BCoE faculty earn Air Force Fellowship
July 20, 2015
STARKVILLE, Miss. – Four BCoE faculty members will spend the summer researching and collaborating with the United States Air Force.
Manav Bhatia, Shanti Bhushan, Mengqi Hu and Rani Sullivan were selected for the 2015 Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (SFFP). The program allows selected individuals with doctorates in engineering, mathematics or science to spend eight to 12 weeks working at Air Force research facilities.
Sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Systems Plus Inc, the program works to foster professional relationships between its fellows and Air Force research laboratory professionals. It also aims to increase the academic community’s awareness of Air Force research needs, encourage university involvement, and provide opportunities for high-quality experimentation at Air Force facilities.
Bhatia, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering, will spend nine weeks at Eglin Air Force Base in Valparaiso, Florida. While there, he will work in the Munitions Directorate to develop efficient computational methods for analysis and design of high-speed flight vehicles that exhibit strong interactions between aerodynamic flow, heat-transfer and elastic deformations.
This is Bhatia’s second experience working in an Air Force research laboratory. In 2012, he worked as a research engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Bhushan, an assistant research professor at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, will also conduct research at Eglin Air Force base during his 10-week SFFP. The Mississippi State doctoral graduate’s research focuses on enabling temporally developing simulations for bypass boundary layer transition, which is an inexpensive alternative to the commonly used spatially developing approach.
Hu, an assistant professor in the industrial and systems engineering department, will spend nine weeks in Dayton, Ohio, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He is working to develop an augmented multi-objective swarm intelligent approach for collaborative product design.
Through his research, he plans to yield a computationally-efficient distributed decision framework for collaborative product design that will be helpful for the Air Force.
Sullivan, an associate professor of aerospace engineering, will be joining Hu at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for her eight-week fellowship. Along with graduate student Leeanna Meadows she will be working with Air Force researchers on bonded composite materials that are used in the aerospace industry.
The team is using optical sensing methods to investigate structural health monitoring techniques to improve their understanding of adhesive bonds’ behavior in load-bearing aerospace structures.
The Bagley College of Engineering is online at www.bagley.msstate.edu.
By: Erin Boozer Zimmer