Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Research Overview

The MAE Department has thirteen full-time faculty members and four adjunct faculty with a total enrollment of about 400 students. Present graduate enrollment in the Department is at about 10% of the total enrollment, or about 40 graduate students. The Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Programs each offer Bachelor of Science, Master of Science and Doctoral (Ph.D.) degrees. The faculty and students are extensively involved in funded research. Recent funding has come from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Sandia Laboratories, the National Institute for Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), the Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Florida Space Grant Program (FSGP) and others. Both graduate and undergraduate students are funded through research grants. Department Highlights (Academic Year 2002-2003)The broad research and scholarly activity of the faculty in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is collectively represented in the technical literature. In the current academic year, the MAE faculty published 13 refereed journal papers, 26 conference proceedings and 4 technical reports. The peer-reviewed journals published in by the MAE faculty in this academic year have included the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Numerical Heat Transfer, Part A: Applications, Optics Letters, Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, SPIE Journal of Biomedical Optics, AIAA Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer, Journal of Structures, Flow, Turbulence and Combustion, and Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites. Additional journal articles are presently under different stages of the review process for these and other journals.

Conference proceedings are a good approach to getting research published in a timely manner. Oftentimes these proceedings lead to journal papers. Most of the national and international conferences participated in by the MAE faculty do, in fact, lead to peer-review papers for presentation and publication in proceedings. The MAE faculty had broad participation in such conferences this past academic year. Some of these presentations represent invited presentations in the faculty member’s area of expertise. These presentations/conference proceedings include: AIAA Thermophysics Conference, SPIE Photonics West, OSA Biomedical Optics in the Southeast, 9th SPIE International Symposium on Remote Sensing, 8th AIAA-ASME Joint Thermophysics and Heat Transfer Conference, NSF Design, Service and Manufacturing Grantees and Research Conference, International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, 7th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences, ASME Summer Heat Transfer Conference, 55th Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, American Physical Society, ASME Fluids Engineering Summer Meeting, RISK 2002 Conference, APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting, ESREL Conference, 4th ICNPAA Conference, 11th International Conference on Wind Engineering, AIAA Applied Aerodynamics Conference, IASTED International Conference, ASC 17th Technical Conference and the ECI Conference- Green Engineering: Defining the Principles. A number of our faculty members have served as session chairs at these conferences. Additional conference publications/presentations are scheduled by the MAE faculty throughout the remainder of 2003, i.e., in the late summer and fall of 2003.

Over the past few years, faculties have also been involved in developing patents related to applications associated with their research activities. Adding to these activities, Dr. Mitra, jointly with Drs. Wayant and Lambert, presently has a patent pending entitled “Method and Apparatus for Delivery of X-Ray Irradiation”.

Two of the MAE faculty, Drs. Subramanian and Larochelle, have been on sabbatical leave this year, which has made it difficult for other faculty to cover all of the departmental obligations. However, this has been a great opportunity for those on sabbatical to publish, write collaborative proposals and expand their research areas. Dr. Subramanian has had the position of visiting scientist/professor at the US Wright Patterson Air Force Base. During his leave, he has taught a graduate level course on turbulence at the Air Force Institute of Technology. He has also been heavily involved in research activities on various aspects of experimental aerodynamics. Dr. Larochelle spent the fall semester working with the Center for Intelligent Machines at McGill University. He taught a graduate level course at McGill on Kinematic Synthesis and also published and wrote proposals. He spent the spring semester at Accuracy Corp. in California where he worked on a cyberknife system for a vision guided robotic radiosurgery system. Of course, he continued his publishing and proposal efforts. Dr. Hsu spent the summer in the prestigious Boeing Faculty Fellowship Program where he interacted on research with NASA and Boeing engineers at NASA Marshall and at various Boeing locations. Drs. Russell and Fleming were awarded NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowships to do research at NASA/KSC this past summer. These research activities focused on two distinct areas of interest to NASA/KSC, i.e., design issues associated with collapsible cryogenic storage vessels for the surface of MARS and design issues related to the development of small, rugged vacuum pumps of the viscous-drag type. These efforts have been continuation of research performed in the previous summer and have resulted in technical reports. These efforts strengthen our connections with NASA/KSC and, hopefully, will lead to a broadening of NASA support through the funding of faculty and students here on campus. Another faculty member, Dr. Sepri, supported by his doctoral student, continues his research efforts with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a type of impulse thruster for future space vehicles. Another potentially very important area of research focus involves collaboration between Dr. Gutierrez, Physics/Space Sciences faculty and NASA/KSC on magnetically levitated space vehicle launch technologies. The test bed for this research is the Foster-Miller EDS Maglev track, which is on loan from NASA and housed in the ARL. There is the strong possibility of NASA providing us with another maglev track, which is currently housed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. There is the possibility that a research center for excellence could be formed with a focus on the development of maglev launch technology, where Florida Tech could be a major participant along with NASA/KSC and other regional universities.

Faculties in MAE continue to do high quality research sponsored by a broad array of funding agencies. These funding sources include the Office of Naval Research, National Science Foundation, Florida Solar Energy Center, Florida Space Research Institute, Northrup Grumman, Florida Sea Grant, NOAA Sea Grant, Florida Department of Insurance and Florida International University FDOI/FIU, FEMA/FDCA, NIH, NASA, California Energy Commission and the Sandia National Laboratories. A special note should be made about the outstanding accomplishment of Dr. Gutierrez, in that he recently won the prestigious ONR Young Investigator Award. His research under this multi-year award relates to the development of actively controlled electrodynamic maglev systems and thus makes use of the Foster-Miller EDS maglev track previously mentioned. The ONR Young Investigator Award is analogous to the NSF Career Award, which Dr. Gutierrez has also received and under which he is pursuing research on ultra-high precision machining.

MAE faculties continue to broaden the department’s teaching/research laboratory capabilities. The Dynamic Systems and Controls Laboratory continues to benefit from Dr. Gutierrez’s NSF Career Award, which has meant an infusion of equipment into the laboratory. The Laser Optics and Instrumentation Laboratory continues to be a vital part of research activities funded by NSF, NIH and FSEC, under the supervision of Drs. Mitra and Subramanian. It is expected that these laboratories will continue to grow in support of multidisciplinary research projects. Dr. Sepri has developed a new pipe flow experiment, which enhances the set of undergraduate experiments in the Fluids Laboratory. Dr. Sepri has also worked diligently on the development of a new six degree-of-freedom force balance for the wind tunnel. His efforts have been supported by substantial equipment donations from the National Instruments Corporation. The enhanced wind tunnel instrumentation will allow aerodynamic experiments to be accessed over the web by faculty, students and researchers at other locations. The Fluids, Heat Transfer and Structural Mechanics Laboratories have been minimally improved over the past year through support of supervising faculty, however, these laboratories need support from the university to upgrade many of the experimental setups and to bring some much needed infrastructure improvements. Improvements to these laboratories will contribute significantly to the quality of the academic programs in mechanical and aerospace engineering, as well as to the quality of research proposals.
It is noteworthy that the MAE Department is conducting a search for two full-time faculty members, one in mechanical and one in aerospace engineering, to start in Fall 2003. These positions will serve as replacements for a retiring faculty member (Professor Stiles) and to help reduce an unacceptably high student-to-faculty ratio. High quality individuals are being sought with expertise in the broad areas of spacecraft propulsion and mechanical systems. It is important that we find individuals who can contribute at the undergraduate and graduate levels, develop a significant research program, and collaborate with other faculty.
In addition to journal papers and conference proceedings coming from the MAE faculty research efforts, a number of patents are at various stages of development. MAE faculty continue to implement new experiments in our teaching/research laboratories. These laboratories include the following:

Photo Voltaic Systems
Director Y I Sharaf-Eldeen, Ph.D., Assiociate Professor, Aerospace Engineering

Florida Tech has installed 500 square-foot solar electric panels atop the F.W. Olin Engineering Complex as part of the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Million Solar Roofs project. The 4.8 kw AstroPower SunLine, solar photovoltaic system will have a monthly output of about 1000 kwh of electricity to supplement university power sources. The system's primary use, however, is educational – teaching and research. Florida Tech's system is the only installation in the initiative in Brevard County.