Rate My Professor Matthew McGilvray

McGilvray has established research groups in hypersonics and particle deposition in gas turbines at Oxford. His research interests include high-speed aerothermodynamics and heat transfer, particle deposition in turbomachinery, and internal cooling heat transfer in gas turbines. He led the development of the Oxford High Density Tunnel (HDT) and T6 Stalker Tunnel, part of the UK’s National Wind Tunnel Facility, enabling replication of spacecraft and hypersonic vehicle conditions. Key projects encompass high-enthalpy wind tunnel upgrades, heat and shear stress augmentation from ablatives and protuberances, thermochemistry and radiation during planetary entry, transpiration cooling and pyrolysis gas effects, and numerical simulations of pulse facilities. He has supervised 17 graduated doctoral students and published 54 journal articles and 135 conference papers. Notable publications include “Performance of Transpiration-Cooled Heat Shields for Re-entry Vehicles” (AIAA Journal, 2020), “Commissioning of the Oxford High Density Tunnel (HDT) for Boundary Layer Stability Measurements” (AIAA Journal, 2018), “Development and Applications of a Coupled Particle Deposition—Dynamic Mesh Morphing Approach for the Numerical Simulation of Gas Turbine Flows” (Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power, 2018), “Gel-casting for Manufacturing Porous Alumina Ceramics with Complex Shapes for Transpiration Cooling” (Advances in Applied Ceramics, 2023), and “Spatial Transformations for Reacting Gas Shock Tube Experiments” (AIAA Journal, 2023). McGilvray was elected an AIAA Associate Fellow in 2026.