Aeronautical Engineering at WMU, a hidden gem

By Fritz Klug
News Editor

A wind tunnel facility located inside of the Applied Aerodynamics Lab at the Kalamazoo Airport. (Chyn Wey Lee/Western Herald)

On the outskirts of the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport, Sudesh Woodiga put neon yellow oil on a plastic wing inside a wind tunnel.
Once it is fully covered, he turned on the LabView software, a backlight, and the wind tunnel started pushing air at 120 feet per second.

With an attached camera Woodiga, a graduate student in the Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering department, is able to measure the skin friction of air on the wing by the thickness of the the oil, using specialized processing codes.

“We know what is exactly going on,” Woodiga said, looking at the wing.
He works with Tianshu Liu, Ph.D at the Applied Aeronautics Lab. It houses two wind tunnels, the small scale tunnel as well as a larger, Advance Design tunnel where speeds can reach up to 250 feet per second, or 190 mph. It also houses a turbo prop engine.

The tunnel was donated to the university by McDonald Douglas. The technique was developed at WMU and is unique to the university, and can reduce drag and increase lift.

When it comes to aircraft, Western Michigan University is known for it’s College of Aviation.

But there is a department within the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences that deals with the design aspect of flight.

The Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering is one of the only two Aeronautical Engineering department in the state of Michigan, the other being the University of Michigan.

[dailymotion]http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbhuxx_western-michigan-university-aeronau_school[/dailymotion]

The department, the largest in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, deals with the engineering behind the instrumentation, exterior design, and engine design of aircraft.

Over the last five years the program has grown from 90 to 160 students, Parviz Merati, Ph.D, department chair, said.

Besides the two undergraduate programs, it also offers master’s and doctoral programs.

According to a NACE study, 2008 graduates of the program entered into jobs with a base salary of $43,750-56,335 per year. Merati said that all graduates of the program get a job within six months of graduating.

One thing the department is looking into is the use of biofuels to fuel engines. William Liou’s AE4660 Aircraft Propulsion Systems class has been looking at CO2 emissions and the effects of using biofuels on a smaller scale engine. The research started this past semester.

“There is a really huge benefit of running biofuels and have [students] see it,” Liou said.

“Using biofuels is nothing fancy or new anymore, but physically being able to run it and see it yourself and compare with the kerosene we run you can see [the difference] right in front of you.”

Liou said the biofuel is something along the lines of ethanol, made from recourses such as grass or corn and produces no carbon dioxide

With six percent of petrol fuel is used in the Aero industry, Liou said that has been difficult to have impact on the cost, infrastructure and availability of oil-based fuels, which has been standardized with contracts signed for years in advance.

Down the hallway from Liou’s office in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Alex Satonik, a senior, is working on a prototype model airplane for the student chapter of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for competition in the spring.

This model that he is working on is a half-scale model. The full-sized will hold 10 softballs and five baseball bats. He shows off other models from years past, including a solar powered plane that can take photos.

“The limiting factor on these models is the radio range,” he said.

With their current radios, the models can fly a half-mile into the air – if they weren’t limited, the models could go thousands of feet in the sky.

It takes four months from drawing to final product. The AIAA lab has a small wind tunnel and flight simulators.

Making such models is a hands on application, Satonik said, “You can actually see the formulas mean something.”

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=13325

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Dec 14 2009. Filed under Multimedia, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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