Established | 1945 |
---|---|
Research type | applied research |
Budget | Not Published |
Field of research | acoustics, guidance control, thermal energy, hydrodynamics, hydroacoustics, propulsion, navigation, communications |
Director | Allan G. Sonsteby |
Location | University Park, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
16802 | |
Campus | University Park |
Affiliations | United States Department of Defense |
Operating agency | Pennsylvania State University |
Website | www |
The Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory (short: Penn State ARL or simply ARL), is a specialized research unit dedicated to interdisciplinary scientific research at the Penn State University Park campus. The ARL is a DoD designated U.S. Navy University Affiliated Research Center. It is the university's largest research unit with over 1,000 faculty and staff. [1] The Laboratory ranks 2nd in DoD and 10th in NASA funding to universities. [2]
ARL maintains a long-term relationship with the Naval Sea Systems Command and the Office of Naval Research.
The ARL was established in 1945 by the U.S. Navy when the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory (USL) was terminated and its torpedo division was moved to Penn State. Eric Walker, the USL's assistant director, moved to Penn State to become its first director from 1945 until 1951, when he became the president of the university.
Today, ARL operates over a dozen facilities ranging from acoustic research to fluid and nuclear.
The ARL is made of six distinct research divisions:
The Applied Research Laboratory operates a number of locations and off-site facilities. [3]
ARL operates the Structural Acoustics Laboratory which houses an array of tanks including an Acoustic Reverberant Tank and an Acoustic Test Tank for acoustic research projects. The facilities include complete instrumentation for measuring and calibrating transducers and transducer arrays. The Acoustic Test Tank is equipped with the instrumentation required for determining the acoustic characteristics of sonar devices designed for frequency response calibrations, radiation pattern plots, and impedance and admittance characterizations. [4]
Additionally, ARL operates a Large Anechoic Chamber with the "mission is to increase the knowledge and understanding of applied electromagnetics in key areas of defense and commercial systems utilizing communications, navigation, and sensor-based systems such as direction finding, for example." The facility is stationed in Warminster, Pennsylvania at the former Naval Air Warfare Center. [5]
The Garfield Thomas Water Tunnel was constructed shortly after the establishment of the ARL at Penn State in cooperation with the U.S. Navy for further torpedo research. The facility operates one of the largest circulating water tunnels in the world. It also operates an array of wind tunnels, glycerin tunnels, and anechoic chamber for used in many physics problems and experiments.
ARL operates the Advanced Nuclear Fuel Test Facility (ANFTF) [6] which is a Westinghouse-funded facility to test advanced power reactors and fuel component designs. The facility entered operation in 1996 with a fully functional 600 MWe nuclear power plant, the Westinghouse AP600. The facility's objective is to characterize the effect of different fuel grid spacers on the onset of the departure from nucleate boiling (DNB) phenomenon and to quantify the critical heat flux (CHF) as the DNB event occurs. [7] [8]
On September 4, 2013 an agreement has been reached between the Applied Research Laboratory and NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. [9] The laboratory created the Space Systems Initiative which would allow the space center to provide bipropellant rockets and liquid methane/liquid oxygen control engines with the university to enabling students to gain a better understanding of rocket performance. Data and results would be shared with NASA.
The Penn State Lunar Lion is a team within the Applied Research Laboratory as part of the Space Systems Initiative which has joined the Google Lunar X Prize. The team is expected to build a robotic spacecraft that is four feet in diameter and weighs 500 pounds. The team hopes to land the craft on the moon in December 2015. [10] The project includes over 500 students and 50 faculty members.
The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laboratory. That agency was dissolved and its assets and personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on October 1, 1958. NASA Ames is named in honor of Joseph Sweetman Ames, a physicist and one of the founding members of NACA. At last estimate NASA Ames had over US$3 billion in capital equipment, 2,300 research personnel and a US$860 million annual budget.
Warminster Township, also referred to as Warminster, is located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, United States. It was formally established in 1711. The township is 13.7 miles north of Philadelphia and had a population of 33,603 according to the 2020 U.S. census.
State College is a borough and home rule municipality in Centre County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is a college town, dominated economically, culturally, and demographically by the presence of the University Park campus of The Pennsylvania State University.
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The Pennsylvania State University, commonly referred to as Penn State and sometimes by the acronym PSU, is a public state-related land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1855 as Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania, Penn State was named the state's first land-grant university eight years later, in 1863. Its primary campus, known as Penn State University Park, is located in State College and College Township.
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Naval Air Warfare Center Warminster was a U.S. Navy military installation located in Warminster, Pennsylvania and Ivyland, Pennsylvania. For most of its existence (1949–1993), the base was known as the Naval Air Development Center (NADC) Warminster, but it has also been referred to as Johnsville Naval Air Development Center, NADC Johnsville or simply, Johnsville.
The Pennsylvania Transportation Institute (PTI), officially known as the Thomas D. Larson Pennsylvania Transportation Institute or Larson Transportation Institute (LTI), was founded in 1968 in Pennsylvania, United States. It is a research unit of Penn State University's College of Engineering located in a research complex on Penn State's University Park Campus. The institute was renamed in January 2008 in recognition of Thomas D. Larson, its first director and major benefactor.
The Pennsylvania State University (PSU) Radiation Science & Engineering Center (RSEC) houses the Breazeale Nuclear Reactor (BNR). This reactor is the oldest operating in the nation and has undergone numerous power upgrades, renovations, and other changes. The reactor serves the research purposes of the Penn State Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering as well as researchers from industry and other universities. Its total licensed thermal output is 1.1 MW, however the reactor is procedurally limited to 1.0 MW (for 100% operation).
Leon H. Sibul was with Pennsylvania State University’s Applied Research Laboratory from 1964 to 2002, where he retired as a senior scientist and professor of acoustics.
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The Garfield Thomas Water Tunnel is one of the U.S. Navy's principal experimental hydrodynamic research facilities and is operated by the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory. The facility was completed and entered operation in 1949. The facility is named after Lieutenant W. Garfield Thomas Jr., a Penn State journalism graduate who was killed in World War II. For a long time, the Garfield Thomas Water Tunnel was the largest circulating water tunnel in the world. It has been declared a historic mechanical engineering landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
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