AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

Abstract

The ability to manipulate a flow field to affect a desired change is of immense practical importance. Flow control involves passive and active devices to affect a beneficial change in wall-bounded or free-shear flows. The presentation will be divided into three major parts: (1) Current and future activities in the Center for Flow Physics and Control at RPI. (2) Basic Research: control of laminar to turbulent transition: characterization and control of T-S waves using wave cancellation technique via localized Piezoelectrically Driven Oscillating Surface (PDOS) actuators. (3) Application: Performance Enhancement of a Vertical Stabilizer of a Commercial Airplane using Distributed Finite Span Synthetic Jet Actuators.

Speaker

Dr. Michael Amitay

He received his D.Sc. (1994) from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Israel. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Arizona (1994-1996) working on active control of heat transfer. From 1996-2003 he held several positions at Georgia Tech Research Institute and at Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined RPI in 2003 and he is currently the James L. Decker '45 Endowed Chair in Aerospace Engineering and the Director and founder of the Center for Flow Physics and Control. He is a Fellow of AIAA. Prof. Amitay has over 210 journal and conference publications, four book chapters, three conference papers that were awarded "best technical paper", one by ASME and two by AIAA, and eight U.S. patents. His current research interests are in the fields of fluid mechanics, aerodynamics and flow control with applications in aerial and ground vehicles, and performance enhancement of wind turbine blades.