Academic Credentials
  • M.Eng., Aeronautical Engineering, Imperial College London, UK, 2020
  • Ph.D., Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia, 2020
  • M.Sc., Aeronautics, RWTH Aachen University, Germany, 2014
Academic Appointments
  • Research Fellow, Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, August 2022 to November 2024
  • Research Fellow, Institute for Combustion Technology, German Aerospace Institute (DLR), July 2020 to July 2022
Professional Honors
  • Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a Schmidt Futures Program
Professional Affiliations
  • Combustion Institute, Member
  • American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Member
Languages
  • German

Dr. Rauch is a mechanical and aerospace engineer specializing in combustion, thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics. He has designed and analyzed combustion devices using computational simulations for both power-generation and propulsion applications. This included hydrogen-fueled gas turbines for greenhouse gas emission free power generation and hypersonic, air-breathing aircraft propulsion engines. These simulations included multi-physics effects such as turbulence, combustion, fuel injection, and flow compressibility. Throughout his work he has coordinated closely with partners for experimental validation and design optimization. Dr. Rauch has extensive experience with commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, such as Fluent, as well as developing custom software to solve reacting flow and heat transfer problems.

Dr. Rauch is experienced in the simulation and analysis of turbulent and reacting flows with both model-based CFD (RANS and LES) and fully resolved CFD (DNS). He has developed numerical methods for CFD of turbulent, reacting flows for high-fidelity simulations of lab-scale devices. These numerical methods were applied to detailed studies of a novel propulsion engine for high-speed flight with simulation thermal boundary conditions informed from experiments. Additionally, he has experience in developing data-driven physics-informed surrogate models for accelerated simulation predictions. 

Before joining Exponent, Dr. Rauch was a researcher at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and at the University of Michigan. During his time at DLR he utilized CFD simulations to optimize a novel greenhouse gas emission free hydrogen combustor allowing for a test-stand ready design to be built by experimental collaborators. As a research fellow at the University of Michigan, Dr. Rauch held a joint appointment in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and the Michigan Institute for Data Science at the University of Michigan. In this position he developed numerical methods for simulating complex geometries in compressible, reacting flows and machine learning (ML) methods to accelerate simulation predictions.

Dr. Rauch is proficient in several coding languages including C++ and Python, chemical kinetic and combustion software packages such as Cantera, the PyTorch and TensorFlow ML libraries, as well as commercial CFD codes such as Ansys Fluent.