Preparing a Research Paper for a Conference

by Grant Palmer

October 27, 1997

One of the ways NASA researchers get the things they do out to other researchers is to publish papers and give presentations at conferences. This is also a good way to find out what other researchers are doing and get some ideas for future work.

There was a conference I wanted to go to called the First Europe-US High Speed Flow Field Database Workshop. This conference was in Italy which is a really cool place to visit, so I was especially motivated. I work in something called Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD for short. CFD is the development of computer programs that, for example, can predict how hot a spacecraft will get when it returns to Earth before the spacecraft is actually built and flown.

Generally a paper is about some new development you have worked on or perhaps a new idea that no one has thought of before. This conference was a little different in that they had a number of test cases for people to apply their CFD programs. You would run your program and then compare the answer you got to previously obtained experimental or flight data. It was kind of like a contest to see who has the best CFD program.

I chose a test case involving a Japanese flight experiment. The vehicle was a little round space probe that was flown aboard a Japanese rocket called the H-II in 1995. The probe was put into orbit and then re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. The friction caused by the air rushing past the probe's surface caused it to heat up. The Japanese measured the surface temperature of the probe and it was up to us to calculate what this temperature was.

The CFD program I used needed to be modified to match the conditions the space probe experienced. A colleague of mine agreed to make the necessary changes . I then ran my computer program on the NASA supercomputer system. The machine I used was a Cray C-90 and is the world's fastest computer.

Once my computer program finished running, I processed the data into the format required by the conference. I generated a lot of figures and line plots of things like temperature, pressure, and surface heat transfer. I wrote up the paper which was then reviewed by four other researchers. They make suggestions and corrections. The finished paper is then sent to the printers.

It will be exciting to go to Italy and present my work. The Europeans and Japanese also have space agencies and they have researchers who work with CFD. It will be very valuable to check out the CFD programs they use.