Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton

Current position

Neil Sandham has been Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southampton since January 1999 and is currently Head of the Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics (AFM) research group.  Previously he was at Stanford University (1985-89), DLR Göttingen (1989-91) and Queen Mary and Westfield College (1991-98).  His expertise is in direct numerical simulation of the governing equations of fluid motion for transitional and turbulent fluid flow, with applications to compressible flow mixing and modelling, transitional separation bubbles, complex turbulent flows including separation and reattachment, trailing edge and near wake flow, shock-turbulence interaction and aeroacoustics.  Recent work also includes multiphase flow simulation in the context of drag reduction and numerical simulation of flow over rough surfaces over a range of Mach numbers. 

Biography

Neil Sandham studied for a Bachelors degree at Leeds University in 1984 and a Masters degree at Stanford University in California in 1986, aided by a Fullbright Scholarship.   He completed a PhD at Stanford in 1989, with a thesis entitled 'A numerical investigation of the compressible mixing layer'.  From 1989 to 1991 he took up a position as Guest Scientist at the German Aerospace Research Laboratory (DLR) in Göttingen, working on problems of transition to turbulence.  In 1991 he returned to the UK, taking up a lecturing position at Queen Mary and Westfield College.  He was promoted to Reader in 1998 and in 1999 took up appointment as Professor of Aerospace Engineering in Southampton.  In 1999 he was co-organiser of the Royal Academy of Engineering research programme on turbulence at the Isaac Newton Institute in the University of Cambridge.  Since arriving at Southampton he has served as Head of Research Group, Course Co-ordinator for Aeronautics and Astronautics and Deputy Head of the School of Engineering Sciences, and has taught undergraduate modules in Aerodynamics, Aerothermodynamics, Aircraft Dynamics, Applied Aerodynamics and Wing Dynamics.  He has supervised over 10 PhD students to a successful completion and published over 70 papers with more than 1300 citations (ISI Web of Knowledge).  He has received funding from EPSRC (25 total, 5 active projects) and EU sources (6 total, 3 active projects) as well as contracts from industry and research establishments.  In the last 5 years he has given three invited plenary talks at international conferences.  He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

• all areas of aerodynamics, including theoretical and computational fluid mechanics
• direct numerical simulation (DNS) of transition and turbulence
• transitional separation bubbles
• aeroacoustics
• shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions
• receptivity mechanisms for transition to turbulence
• modelling of aerofoil based on an unsteady viscous-inviscid interaction
• drag reduction based on partial slip (superhydrophobic surface technology)
• optimisation of computer codes for massively parallel GPU architectures

Primary research group:  Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics

Research projects