Mississippi State University
The College of Engineering and other divisions at Mississippi State University have many research facilities that relate to gas turbine research. A few of these that relate to current proposed research efforts for AGTSR are discussed here.
The Mississippi State University/National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center specializes in development and application of advanced field simulation algorithms, such as computational fluid dynamics, and in the development of scientific visualization tools.
Computer equipment in the ERC includes: One sun Ultra HPC1000 supercomputer, one silicon Graphics Onyx2 Infinite Reality graphics server, two Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine2 graphics servers, four Silicon Graphics Power Challenge XL compute servers, one Power Challenge L compute server, one sun Ultra Enterprise 5000 NFS file server, one Sun Ultra Enterprise 5000 compute server, a dedicated FTP/WWW server, 32 processor SUPER-Msparc (designed and constructed at the ERC), 140 Sun Sparcstation class workstations, 80 Silicon Graphics workstations, 2 Virtual Reality booms and assorted other personal computers, printers, and peripherals. The Center heavily uses both serial and parallel supercomputers at installations around the country over a T3 connection to BBNPlanet and the Internet.
The addition of the COVE Immersive Visualization facility has fundamental effects on the scale and capability of in-house visualization and is expected to be one of the most heavily used laboratory facilities within the Center.
These vast resources, along with other university computers, make MSU the 13 th ranked university in the U.S. in supercomputer power.
The College of Engineering has experimental facilities for use in boundary-layer heat transfer research and in materials engineering research. The Thermal and Fluids Dynamics Laboratory includes a wind tunnel designated to study the effects of surface roughness on heat transfer in turbulent boundary layers. The department of Aerospace Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering along with the university microscope center have a wide range of instrumentation and experimental facilities for metallurgical research.
The Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis laboratory is a research center in the college of engineering. The Laboratory specializes in the development and application of advanced optical instruments for high temperature environments.
Personnel and Related Experience
The following biographs are for faculty with direct connection to proposed AGTSR related research.
Dr. John T. Berry, Coleman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, is internationally renowned for his work in metal castings and metal machining. Dr. Berry has over 40 years experience in metallurgical research. He has published over 125 refereed journal articles and many book chapters and conference papers. Dr. Berry has done pioneering work in the application of computational heat transfer to metal castings, in the prediction and control of porosity formation in long freezing-range alloy castings, and in high-speed machining.
Dr. J. Mark Janus, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, has been active in the area of computational fluid dynamics since 1983. He has devoted most of his effort toward algorithm and software development. Dr. Janus' initial authoring of a computer code to solve the flow about general rotating machinery applications and continued evolutionary support of that effort has resulted in the realization of a production version of the software. The software has enabled the flow analysis of very complex configurations including an advanced ducted propfan design of Pratt & Whitney, a propfan-powered cruise missile concept investigated by the NASA and the Navy, unsteady general aviation propeller simulations, conceptual tip-engine configurations, and rotating stall simulations.
Dr. James C. Newman, Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering, has been active in the areas of multidisciplinary analysis, sensitivity analysis, and design optimization since 1994. Prior to this, Dr. Newman's focus area was in the simulation of complex-steady and unsteady moving boundary configurations using both unstructured grid and structured grid domain-decomposition techniques. Dr. Newman has developed software to perform computational fluid-structure, and fluid-thermal, interaction and analysis as well as pioneered new algorithms for evaluating multidisciplinary sensitivity derivatives. Additionally, he has worked closely with NASA researchers to incorporate these techniques into analysis software to provide design capabilities.
Dr. B. K. Hodge, Giles Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, is a well-known author of engineering textbooks. He has published three editions of Analysis and Design of Energy Systems and the Compressible Fluid Dynamics with Personal Computer Applications , both by Prentice-Hall. In addition, he has conducted pioneering research in surface roughness effects on turbulent flows and in combustible flows and research in applied energy systems.
Dr. Robert P. Taylor, Associate Dean of Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has conducted pioneering work in the development of computational models for surface roughness effects on heat transfer in the turbulent boundary layer. He has also worked extensively in the area of experimental uncertainty analysis and is a holder of the Abernathy Uncertainty Award from the International Society for Measurement and Control. He has published over 150 journal articles and other technical papers. |