DOD awards research grants for summer internships

By David McNally, ARL Public AffairsMarch 10, 2017

DOD awards research grants for summer internships
1 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption – (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL
DOD awards research grants for summer internships
2 / 2 Show Caption + Hide Caption – (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- The Department of Defense notified winners for its High Performance Computing Internship Program, or HIP, Feb 13, 2017.

The program provides interns with "the computational skills and experience necessary to support the DOD's future warfighter needs," according to an email.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory at APG will receive funding for eight interns to work on computational models to assist ongoing research.

Dr. Krista Limmer, a scientist with ARL's Weapons and Materials Research Directorate, will receive funding to mentor an intern based on her research proposal to discover ways to mitigate corrosion in magnesium alloys. Magnesium is a lightweight structural metal, but it's susceptible to corrosion.

"We would need to do a lot of lab work to find a solution by sprinkling in many combinations of elements from the periodic table, or we could do it in a high-throughput manner on a computer," Limmer said.

Limmer hopes to streamline the computational modeling and build a database to find a technology solution by developing a new data mining framework.

"We hope to push through a lot of compositions to see whether or not they would be good for corrosion and then we can validate them in the lab," she said.

Dr. Luis Bravo, from the ARL Vehicle Technology Directorate, will receive funding to mentor two interns based on his research proposal, "High Fidelity Simulation of Heterogeneous Combustion and Gas Turbine Stator-Rotor Interactions."

"They will be working on advanced physics-based models applied to gas-turbine spray combustion and turbomachinery optimization that will improve the development of variable-speed power turbine technology and enable military vehicles to operate over a wider speed-range," he said.

Drs. Matthew Floros and Hao Kang, also from ARL-VTD, will receive funding for two interns to work on tilt rotor aeroelastic stability.

"A tiltrotor vehicle concept is one of the configurations selected for the Army's Joint Multirole Technology Demonstrator program," Floros said. "The students will work on high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics research of tiltrotor aircraft stability."

The laboratory will also have funding for three additional HIP interns. Two interns will work on materials sciences projects for Drs. John Brennan and James Larentzos from the Energetic Materials Science Branch, and one intern will work for Thomas Kendall from the Computational Sciences Division in the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate to support a software analytics project.

Deborah Schwartz, associate director for Workforce Development at the DOD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, congratulated the teams on winning the funding in an email message to the mentors.

"It is my expectation that all of the FY17 HIP interns will find their experience challenging and rewarding, and it is my sincere hope that they will become a part of our DOD workforce and HPCMP community upon graduation," she wrote.

HIP is one of several programs that the High Performance Computing Modernization Office provides to promote state-of-the-art computational research within the DOD, she said.

---

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory, currently celebrating 25 years of excellence in Army science and technology, is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, which has the mission to provide innovative research, development and engineering to produce capabilities for decisive overmatch to the Army against the complexities of the current and future operating environments in support of the Joint Warfighter and the Nation. RDECOM is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Material Command.