Program Overview
The Department of Aerospace Engineering provides students with a strong background in engineering and applied science while placing emphasis on aircraft and spaceflight engineering. The department's objective is to provide education, research, and public service in aerospace sciences and engineering of the highest possible quality to meet the needs of the State of Illinois and the nation as a whole. We wish to instill in students the knowledge, values, and leadership ability in engineering that will prepare them for lifetimes of continued learning and growth in the profession and in a broad spectrum of other fields.Research
The department's research program aims at maintaining a leadership position in the rapidly changing field of aerospace and in producing aerospace engineers with a solid foundation and a creative professional approach. The future success of our graduate program depends upon its ability to construct a curricular experience that guarantees both a student's depth and breadth while retaining the strong student-advisor relationship that is important to our research. Our graduates must be strong in at least one core discipline and very capable in several related areas. The breadth of engineering research today demands a much more flexible engineer than in the past. Tomorrow's graduates must be competent in their chosen specialty and also be prepared to integrate their experience with engineers from any number of disciplines.
Our future leaders in research and technology will need to be far more adept at team research, systems integration, and important systems requirements in seemingly unrelated areas. Recognition of the computer, networking, and communications revolution has to be present in any modern curriculum. The interdisciplinary nature of aerospace engineering and the broad credentials of the College of Engineering make it certain that contributions from related mechanical sciences and electrical and computer engineering are essential components of an aerospace career. Some of the broader engineering specialties, such as manufacturing or simulation will become our research topics in the future, and we must provide the necessary flexibility in our program to accommodate non-traditional engineering training. Courses will be structured and restructured as needed to accommodate these specialized needs.
Faculty
The department's most important resource is its faculty. Research activities in the AE Department encompass a wide range of problem areas in aerospace engineering and related engineering disciplines. The traditional strength of the department is in aerodynamics and propulsion. Eight faculty teach or conduct research in this area. Laboratories dedicated to this type of research include: Advanced Heat Exchanger Lab, Aerodynamics Research Lab, Aerospace Flight Simulation Lab, Applied Computational Aerodynamics Lab, High Energy Laser Lab, Compressible Fluid Mechanics Lab, Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab, Energy Deposition Flow Control Lab, Electric Propulsion Lab, Fuel Cell Lab, Shock Tube and High Pressure Combustion Lab, and Supersonic Inlets Lab. Six faculty members have interest and conduct research in the areas of astrodynamics, control and dynamical systems. The Computational Astrodynamic Research Lab (CARL) and the Nonlinear Systems Lab provide opportunities for graduate education and research in the general area of control and dynamical systems. Another active area in this department is structural mechanics and materials. Five faculty members teach and conduct research in this area. The state-of-the-art Composites Manufacturing Lab provides training and attracts a great deal of industrial support. Novel computational tools are being developed at the Computational Solid Mechanics and Aeroelasticity Lab for various issues associated with fracture mechanics, composite manufacturing, and other research topics in solid mechanics. In the High Strain Rate Mechanics Lab, researchers are studying the dynamic behavior and failure of advanced materials. Other active labs in this area are: Linear and Nonlinear Dynamics and Vibrations Lab and Nanomechanics and Materials Research Lab. Faculty are active in the major research centers on campus, including the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (CSAR), the Coordinated Science Lab (CSL), etc.
Facilities
Members of the AE Department have access to a wide range of excellent computational facilities. In addition to the various computers available in many individual AE research groups and mainly dedicated to in-house research endeavors, the department maintains a series of high-end HP and LINUX workstations and personal computers (PCs and PowerMacs) to support the research and educational projects of its undergraduate and graduate students. Both UNIX platforms and personal computers are loaded with a wide variety of software for design (Unigraphics, ProEngineer, etc.), computational fluid dynamics (GridGen, Fidap, WIND, etc.), solid mechanics (Patran, Ansys, Abaqus, etc.), and mathematical analysis (Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, etc.). The departmental computational facilities are complemented by the Engineering Workstation Laboratories (EWS) containing more than 300 high-end HP, Sun, and NT workstations, available at various locations throughout the campus and also loaded with a wide range of commercial codes. Finally, large-scale computations are often performed on the massively parallel machines available at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) located on the UIUC campus and accessed through the campus high-speed network. In addition to its advanced computational facilities, NCSA also provides access to the Mass Storage System used to store very large sets of data and to its Visualization Lab for rapid rendering of numerical data.
Funded Research
Funded research has grown significantly in the department over the past five years. The department has new faculty in emerging research areas and has made a significant investment in new research laboratories and equipment. Currently, twenty faculty have a total funded research expenditure of approximately 5.0 million from AFOSR, DARPA, DOD, DOE, DOT, NASA, NSF, ONR, and industry sponsor grants.
These research programs, combined with the constantly evolving graduate curriculum, provide a wealth of opportunity for graduate study.
