People Category: Speaker

Dr. John Bennewitz is an assistant professor in the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is the principal investigator of the Advanced Propulsion, Energy and Combustion Science Laboratory (APECSLab), managing a group of students to pursue research into advanced propulsion systems for liquid and solid propellants and power generation. Prior to joining UAH, he was the principal investigator for the rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) program at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). During his five years at AFRL, he performed over 2000 successful hot-fire tests of developmental RDRE hardware that demonstrated robust detonation and operability for a wide range of injection designs. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008, before completing his M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2015. Upon graduation, he worked as a postdoctoral research scholar at UCLA’s Energy and Propulsion Research Laboratory studying acoustically-coupled fuel droplet combustion. His present research focuses on investigating fundamental detonation physics and engine scaling mythologies of small-scale detonation-based engines for in-space applications.