Mark Drela (July 1, 1959) is an American aeronautical engineer, currently the Professor of Fluid Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Elected Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is primarily concerned with computational engineering, design, and optimization. [1] Drela is famed for his work on aerodynamics softwares:
In 2009, Drela was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for creation of breakthrough aircraft designs and design software that enabled operation in new flight regimes.
Wingtip devices are intended to improve the efficiency of fixed-wing aircraft by reducing drag. Although there are several types of wing tip devices which function in different manners, their intended effect is always to reduce an aircraft's drag by partial recovery of the tip vortex energy. Wingtip devices can also improve aircraft handling characteristics and enhance safety for following aircraft. Such devices increase the effective aspect ratio of a wing without greatly increasing the wingspan. Extending the span would lower lift-induced drag, but would increase parasitic drag and would require boosting the strength and weight of the wing. At some point, there is no net benefit from further increased span. There may also be operational considerations that limit the allowable wingspan.
Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) is an academic program at many universities which comprises scientific and engineering aspects of computing. CSE is also a term often used in Europe to translate the name of engineering informatics academic programs.
Jeffrey Alan Hoffman is an American former NASA astronaut and currently a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is a professional society for the field of aerospace engineering. The AIAA is the U.S. representative on the International Astronautical Federation and the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences. In 2015, it had more than 30,000 members among aerospace professionals worldwide.
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology. His research in neural networks and computational neuroscience has been pioneering.
Paul B. MacCready Jr. was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could "Do more with less".
J. Kim Vandiver is an American university professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Vandiver is the dean of undergraduate research and a professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering. He is one of the foremost authorities on the dynamics of offshore structures and flow-induced vibration and is a member of the faculty of the MIT-WHOI joint program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering.
Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross was an American computer scientist pioneer, and chairman of SofTech, Inc. He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), a programming language to drive numerical control in manufacturing. His later work focused on a pseudophilosophy he developed and named Plex.
Nancy G. Leveson is an American specialist in system and software safety and a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, United States.
Dr. John S. Langford is the Founder and CEO of Electra.aero, a startup developing hybrid electric aircraft for regional mobility. He was previously Founder, President, and C.E.O. of Aurora Flight Sciences. Langford founded Aurora Flight Sciences in 1989 in order to design and manufacture high altitude UAVs that could be used for global climate change research. In 2004, Langford received Virginia’s Outstanding Industrialist award for his contribution to business development in Virginia.
DIDO is a MATLAB optimal control toolbox for solving general-purpose optimal control problems. It is widely used in academia, industry, and NASA. Hailed as a breakthrough software, DIDO is based on the pseudospectral optimal control theory of Ross and Fahroo. The latest enhancements to DIDO are described in Ross.
The Vortex lattice method, (VLM), is a numerical method used in computational fluid dynamics, mainly in the early stages of aircraft design and in aerodynamic education at university level. The VLM models the lifting surfaces, such as a wing, of an aircraft as an infinitely thin sheet of discrete vortices to compute lift and induced drag. The influence of the thickness and viscosity is neglected.
Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is similar, but deals with the electronics side of aerospace engineering.
Margaret Heafield Hamilton is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
QBlade is an open-source, cross-platform simulation software for wind turbine blade design and aerodynamic simulation. It comes with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) based on Qt.
John Oluseun Dabiri is a Nigerian-American aeronautics engineer and the Centennial Chair Professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), with appointments in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT) and Mechanical Engineering. His research focuses on unsteady fluid mechanics and flow physics, with particular emphasis on topics relevant to biology, energy, and the environment. He is best known for his research of the hydrodynamics of jellyfish propulsion and the design of a vertical-axis wind farm adapted from schooling fish. He is the director of the Biological Propulsion Laboratory, which examines fluid transport with applications in aquatic locomotion, fluid dynamic energy conversion, and cardiac flows, as well as applying theoretical methods in fluid dynamics and concepts of optimal vortex formation.
Nils Otto Myklestad was an American mechanical engineer and engineering professor. An authority on mechanical vibration, he was employed by a number of important US engineering firms and served on the faculty of several major engineering universities. Myklestad made significant contributions to both engineering practice and engineering education, publishing a number of widely influential technical journal papers and textbooks. He also was granted five US patents during his career.
Kurt Heinrich Hohenemser was a German-born American aerospace engineer and pioneer in the field of helicopter design.
R. John Hansman is an American physicist currently the T. Wilson Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Elected Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Edward M. Greitzer is an American physicist currently the H. N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.