Daniel Kirk, Ph.D., Professor | College of Engineering and Science - Expert with Florida Tech

Areas of Expertise

Aerospace Applications

Rocket Propulsion

Rocket Science

Fluid Mechanics

Fluid Dynamics

About

Dr. Daniel R. Kirk completed his Ph.D. and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics under a National Science Foundation Fellowship.

He joined Florida Tech in 2004 and is currently a professor in the Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences.

Dr. Kirk’s research interests focus on air-breathing and rocket propulsion, experimental and computational fluid dynamics, and advanced and additive manufacturing for existing and new aerospace applications. He has obtained over $4 million dollars in external funding, produced over 80 conference and journal publications, served as a visiting scholar at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and NASA Kennedy Space Center and managed research projects with NASA, the U.S. Air Force and the Office of Naval Research.

In collaboration with NASA and MIT, Dr. Kirk’s research group has directed experiments onboard the International Space Station to study how liquid propellant slosh behavior affects the dynamics of rocket motion.

Research Focus

Air-Breathing Propulsion for High Thrust-to-Weight Aircraft

Analysis, Design and Testing of MEMS-scale, Liquid Bi-propellant Micro-rocket Systems.

Fluid, thermodynamic and heat transfer analyses of various system components, including turbo-pump assemblies, valve control of propellants, cooling methods, thrust chamber and nozzle design. Development of transient models to predict governing time scales in rocket starting processes, including time scales for ignition, supercritical behavior of propellants, cooling performance, and thrust versus time dependence. Experimental performance investigation of micro-servo valve assemblies for design of fluidically-actuated micro-valves, with application to aerospace, mechanical and biological systems.