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AE Students Garner College, University Awards

Michael J. Duffy, a 2008 bachelor’s degree graduate of Aerospace Engineering, was recognized this spring as a Bronze Tablet member. The names of this select group of undergraduate students are inscribed on bronze tablets that are displayed on the first floor of the University of Illinois Main Library.

Bodony is 2008 AIAA Teacher of the Year; AE Faculty Listed Among Teachers Ranked as Excellent

Joining the AE faculty just one and a half years ago, Daniel J. Bodony already has been chosen as the 2008 Teacher of the Year for the local American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) student chapter.

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Yen

Shee Mang Yen

Professor Emeritus

smyen@uiuc.edu		 Return to: Faculty
Office address Mailing Address Research Group
215 Talbot Lab
217-333-6360		 306 Talbot Lab
104 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL  61801 		 
Research Areas
 

He is a professor emeritus in the Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering Department at UIUC. He was a professor from 1962 to 1990 and acting head from 1985 to 1988.

He has had extensive experience in doing pioneering research in propulsion, hypersonic flows, computational fluid dynamics, rarefied gas dynamics, and computational hydrodynamics.

As a graduate student, he worked with Professors McCloy and Korst on the theoretical and experimental investigations of ejector jet (self-starting ram jet), pulse jet and scram jet in the late 1940's.

He has been involved in the development of computational methods for hypersonic re-entry and wake problems for more than twenty years. The research is relevant to heating and signature problems of missiles. His work was supported by AVCO. He was also a consultant for AVCO regarding other problems such as those of aerodynamic forces in a rarefied environment.

One of his major contributions in computational fluid dynamics was in applying the kinetic theory approach by solving the full nonlinear Boltzmann equation for the shock wave, and heat and mass transport problems by using only the first and second generation computers in the late 1960's and early 1970's. He worked with Arnold Nordsieck and Bruce Hicks, two outstanding pioneers in doing research by using digital computers. The effort was a breakthrough in rarefied gas dynamics. The method has been used to develop approximate engineering methods, and the results have been used to validate their theoretical calculations, as well as experimental results.

He was invited by the USSR Academy of Sciences to give lectures in the Soviet Union three times (1976, 1978, and 1982). The Academy also established an exchange program under which many Soviet scientists have visited and worked with him. His research in rarefied gas dynamics (non-equilibrium gas dynamics) which has been applied to a large range of problems encountered in aerodynamics, space flights, meteorology, and electronics was supported by JSEP, ONR, NOAA, Sandia and NATO. He had interactions with colleagues in many countries in Europe, particularly, those at the von Karman Institute in Belgium, USSR Moscow and Siberian computing centers.

Gerald Karr, who was his Ph.D. student, conceived the idea of using a spinning gyro satellite to measure orbital gas density, as well as gas surface interaction parameters. The feasibility study (his thesis research) supported by NASA/Marshall was successful.

He was a consultant for NASA/Marshall on the contamination of space experiments due to outgassing from spacecrafts. One of the experiments studied was the wake shield, which was attempted in the recent space shuttle.

In the early 1970's, he worked with people in the ILLIAC IV project on implementation of computational methods on the supercomputer with parallel processors. Also, in the 1970's, ONR developed an interest in promoting the use of numerical methods to solve naval hydrodynamics problems. They initiated the First International Conference on Numerical Ship Hydrodynamics in 1975, and asked him to initiate a research for computational hydrodynamics because of his experience in solving complex flow and boundary condition problems. He accepted the challenge of doing a new problem. He interacted with colleagues at the David Taylor Research Center, the University of California at Berkeley, and Cal. Tech. to develop an understanding of the basic features of methods used by them. He then modified the features and developed an accurate and efficient method to solve the full nonlinear ship wave problem. Results obtained from this method for a particular hull surface were found to be in agreement with towing tank experiments. He has made his computer program package available to many qualified users. It may be considered as a numerical test facility to obtain nonlinear solutions of any hull surface.

Research Areas:

Nordsieck

  • 1956 Invented a Monte Carlo Method to evaluate the Boltzmann collision integral.

Hicks and Nordsieck

  • 1958 - 1966 Implemented Nordsieck's method on ILLIAC I and CDC 1604, studied the dominant errors and developed methods to reduce dominant error from 50% to 0.8%. (CSL / JSEP)

Hicks and Yen

  • 1966 - 1970 Obtained the direct solution of the Boltzmann equation for shock waves in a gas of elastic spheres. (CSL / ONR)
  • Studied in detail the internal shock wave structure. (CSL / ONR)
  • Developed simplified methods to study the shock wave structure.

Yen

  • 1970 Obtained the Boltzmann solutions for the heat transfer and heat and mass transfer problems. (CSL / ONR)
  • Implemented Nordsieck's Monte Carlo method to evaluate the Boltzmann collision integral for Maxwellian molecules. (CSL / ONR)
  • Obtained the Boltzmann solution for shock waves in a gas of Maxwellian molecules and studies the effect of intermolecular collision law on the shock wave structure. (CSL / ONR)
  • Studied the implementation of Nordsieck's method for binary gas mixtures. (CSL/ONR)
  • Worked with colleagues at Stanford on the comparison of theoretical and numerical solutions of rarefied gas flow problems.
  • Worked with experimentalists at USC, Michigan and the University of Aachen on the comparison of experimental results with our calculations for the shock wave and heat transfer problem.
  • Worked with the Soviet scientists under an exchange program on the development of Monte Carlo methods to solve more complex rarefied gas dynamic problems. (US Academy of Sciences and USSR Academy of Sciences)
  • Studied the application of kinetic theory to solve the plasma diode problem. (NOAA)
  • Worked with people at the von Karman's Laboratory in Belgium and a colleague in Norway on the application of kinetic theory approaches to vapor motion near an interphase boundary. (NATO)
  • Worked with people at Sandia on the development of a Monte Carlo method to study the feasibility of isotope enrichment by aerodynamic means. (Sandia)
  • Worked as a consultant to NASA/Marshall to develop a method to study the level of self-contamination due to outgassing near a wake shield experiment (for material processing) to be performed on the space shuttle. (NASA/Marshall)
  • Consultant to Avco on rarefied gas flow problems related to missiles. (AVCO)
  • Participated in a workshop to help NSF initiate an interdisciplinary research program in computational microdynamics to develop an understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena that dominate the behavior of micro-electromechanical devices. (NSF)

Karr

  • 1965-1970 Conceived the concept of an orbiting gyro experiment to measure orbital gas density as well as gas surface interaction parameters and studied its feasibility. (CSL - NASA/Marshall)

Education:

  • Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering University of Illinois 1951
  • M.S. Mechanical Engineering University of Illinois 1948
  • B.S. Mechanical Engineering Chiao-Tung University 1943

Academic Positions:

  • 1956 - 1990 Associate professor and professor of Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering Department, University of Illinois.
  • 1985 - 1987 Acting head, Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering Department, University of Illinois.
  • 1951 - 1956 Assistant professor and associate professor, Kansas State University.
  • 1949 - 1950 Fellow (University of Illinois Fellowship).
  • 1947 - 1949 Research assistant, Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering Department, University of Illinois.
  • Engineer - Shanghai Power Company, Central Machine Works, Kiang Nan Power Administration.
  • Principal staff scientist, AVCO Corporation.
  • Consultant - McDonnell Aircraft Company, Convair, Ballistic Research Laboratories, AVCO Corporation, NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center.

Major Honors and Awards:

  • Member of a computational research team (Nordsieck, Hicks, Yen) in Coordinated Science Laboratory that successfully solved the full nonlinear Boltzmann equations for several nonequilibrium flow problems - a pioneering computational effort of more than 10 years using mostly only first and second generation computers - a breakthrough in computational fluid dynamics and rarefied gas dynamics that occurred more than twenty years ago. The Boltzmann equation is a basic equation in physics. The collision integrals in it were considered to be intractable.
  • Conducted pioneering research in implementing fluid dynamic problems on supercomputers with parallel processors. Co-sponsored (with the ILLIAC IV Project) one of the first supercomputing conferences in 1973.
  • Directed a research group that developed the first accurate numerical method to solve the full nonlinear ship wave problem - a major accomplishment in ship hydrodynamics.
  • Conducted research on hypersonic re-entry problems as a consultant for AVCO/Textron for more than 20 years.
  • Member of a space research team (Knoebel, Karr, Yen) in the Coordinated Science Laboratory that developed the concept of a passive satellite for measurements of orbital gas density as well as gas surface interaction parameters

Selected Publications:

  •  "Treatment of the Nonequilibrium Vapor Motion Near an Evaporating Interphase Boundary," Chemical Engineering Communications, Vol. 10, pp. 357-367, 1981 (with T. Ytrehus).
  • "Mean Free Path of Emitted Gas From Spacecraft," Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 255, February 1982.
  • "Numerical Solution of the Nonlinear Boltzmann Equation for Nonequilibrium Gas Flow Problems," Ann. Rev. Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 16, pp. 67-97, 1984.
  • "Thermally Nonequilibrium Hypersonic Shock Layer Near the Stagnation Point," Phys. Fluids, No. 1, Vol. 29, p. 9, 1986.
  • "Numerical Solution of the Nonlinear Ship Wave Problem," Proc. Fourth International Conference on Numerical Ship Hydrodynamics, pp. 246-258, 1987.