Liquid Surge

The program seeks foundational understanding through two coupled technical thrusts: (a) Experimental Diagnostics and Validation—developing innovative prototype wave diagnostic hardware to characterize transient phenomena in pressurized liquid media, achieving precision state and perturbation control, measurement fidelity via non-intrusive sensing, and experimental configurations limiting boundary effects; and (b) Physics-Based Predictive Modeling—developing a novel standalone computational tool implementing physics-based representations of transient liquid behavior, capable of capturing coupled fluid mechanical and thermodynamic behavior across molecular, mesoscale, and continuum scales, executable on standard high-performance computing platforms, taking unperturbed thermodynamic fluid state as input and outputting complete shock profiles for wave Mach numbers 1 to 4. Efforts must demonstrate operability of experimental rigs at critical and supercritical pressures, validate computational models against experimental data according to specified metrics (measurement accuracy and prediction error targets ranging from 50 dB to 7% depending on operating regime), and deliver integrated handshake between experimental and computational results. Deliverables include tabulated thermophysical shock jump responses, mid-program and final reports, predictive kinetic-theory-based code, technical drawings of prototype hardware, and standard operating procedure documentation.