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Mitch Wall is studying atmospheric conditions at the threshold of space to improve future hypersonic vehicles and spacecraft.

An aerospace PhD student and Smead Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, Wall is conducting computational fluid dynamics research to better understand a challenging zone of the atmosphere between 70-120 km in altitude.

“We fly spacecraft through that region of the atmosphere, but it represents a range where the uncertainty in our fluid dynamics analysis is larger,” Wall said. “As a result, when building a vehicle, we have to ask the guidance people or the structures people to overdesign their systems to compensate because we can’t shrink our uncertainty.”

Traveling at hypersonic speeds, more than five times the speed of sound, causes the temperature of air and other gases around a vehicle to reach thousands of degrees, triggering chemical reactions on and around the vehicle. Reducing uncertainty in the atmospheric conditions would ease vehicle design and operation.

The analysis, however, demands much more than a typical desktop computer. Wall’s work requires use of

“I’m working on a solver that couples two of the labs in-house fluid dynamics solvers,” Wall said. “One is for low altitude flow and another is more commonly used for high altitude flows in space. I’m wrangling these two different methods and there’s two different codes to learn instead of one. Then I’m dealing with the nuts and bolts to get them to play nicely together.”

It is a type of research with significant potential for the future.

“As we try to do more flying hypersonically, this is an area where we can sharpen our pencil and then be able to go places we wouldn’t necessarily go otherwise,” Wall said.

Wall’s research is funded through a prestigious National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship he received in 2022.

“I really like the project I’m working on and having a fellowship you have the freedom to steer where you go. It was pretty exciting to get,” he said.

Growing up, Wall knew he had interests in math and physics, but it was not until high school teachers encouraged him to pursue engineering that he saw it as a career possibility.

“I didn’t really have an idea of what I could do with it. Understanding physical systems and diving deep into the math, understanding the world around you and having that perspective going through life is super satisfying to me,” he said.

Originally from Wisconsin, he completed his undergraduate degree in engineering mechanics at the University of Wisconsin Madison and decided to go on for a PhD at CU Boulder.

“The experiences I had at internships pushed me toward a PhD,” Wall said. “The people I was really impressed with and thought had really cool jobs, a lot of them had PhDs. I saw how that enabled you to make more important fundamental engineering decisions on projects.”

Wall chose CU Boulder after connecting with students working under professor Iain Boyd, an expert on hypersonic aerothermodynamics. Boyd became his PhD advisor.

“I knew I wanted to do aerospace and heard about professor Boyd and got in touch with his students. It really attracted me here; everyone in his lab were working on things they cared about,” Wall said.

As a first generation college student, pursuing an advanced degree was a major step, but it was taken by both Wall and his brother.

“We didn’t come from an academic background and now he has a BS/MS in architecture and I’m working on my PhD,” Wall said. “I took education and ran with it. My dad was a carpenter, and I see the thread there, understanding how things are put together and work. My parents are very proud, which is nice.”