The University of South Florida
The University of South Florida is comprised of five campuses located in Tampa , Sarasota , St. Petersburg , Fort Meyers , and Lakeland . The main campus in Tampa was founded in 1956 as the University of South Florida
The Department of Mechanical Engineering began operation in 1960. At the present time, there are eight regular professional faculty members in the department, all of whom hold the doctorate. The department is housed in one of the two engineering buildings on campus and has laboratory facilities for heat transfer, fluid mechanics, vibrations, data acquisition, and CAD.
The University of South Florida has an extensive collection of engineering volumes and periodicals. It has access to all other libraries through inter-library loan and has an excellent computerized data base, information search facility.
The College of Engineering operates a cluster of compute server (Sun Enterprise 3500 8-processor 400 MHz, 2.5 GB RAM), Mail server (Sun Enterprise 250 dual-processor 300 MHz, 1 GB RAM), file servers (Dell 4300, and 2300 dual processor 450 MHz and Dell 2100, 2200), web and database servers (Sun Ultra 10s) for students and faculty within the College.
Engineering Computing provides college-wide access to computing for undergraduate/graduate students and faculty. Students and faculty also have access to local facilities in the engineering departments the campus-side distributed computing and the IBM facility at the Central Florida Regional Data Center (CFRDC). The University is an Internet2 site and links are available to directly connect to all major supercomputing centers in the country.
The group of research workers here are capable of doing research and development projects in combustion, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and composite materials. The work can be theoretical study, numerical simulation or experimental. The facilities available are the wind tunnel, axial-symmetric flow device, laser-Doppler system, engine dynamometer, engine testing equipment, and machine shop. The members in this group are Drs. Roger Crane, Autar Kaw, Jose L.F. Protiero, M.M. Rahman, and S.J. Benjamin Ying.
To give you some details, using computer code KIVA, Ying, et. al. are doing numerical simulation for reacting flow in a combustor to study the chemical kinetics for pollutants in propane-air combustion. Six papers have been published in this area. A few years ago, Ying worked on the theory for developing a turbulent flow and investigated the iron formation on furnace floors of boilers in power plants. Several papers are published in these areas. In addition, Ying conducted a coal gasification project in the University. The coal gas produces could make a six cylinder engine operate smoothly. Dr. Roger Crane did extensive research work in heat transfer especially in the contact thermal resistance area. Recently, he has been working with NASA and Florida Power Company on energy storage systems. Several papers have been published in these areas. Dr. Jose Portiero is an experimentalist, teaching Aerospace Propulsion, Mechanical Lab II and Advanced Fluid Mechanics. He is also conducting research work in fluids. Dr. M.M. Rahman is a new faculty member in our department. He has a wealth of research work experience in the fields of thermo-fluids and heat transfer.