Research Contributions & Accomplishments of Selected Mechanical Engineering Faculty at Texas A&M University
J.N. Reddy Distinguished Professor and Oscar S. Wyatt, Jr., ’45 Endowed Chair Ph.D., University of Alabama at Huntsville, 1973 Professor Reddy is internationally renowned for his lasting contributions to two broad research areas: mechanics of advanced and composite materials and structures, and interdisciplinary computational mechanics. The higher-order plate and shell theories he developed to account for transverse shear deformation in composite plate and shell structures bear his name: Reddy’s third-order theory and Reddy’s layerwise theory. These theories have been used by other researchers around the world to study a variety of structural problems for bending, buckling, and vibration response. Professor Reddy’s research has far-reaching impact and provides the cutting-edge advances that enable others to adapt his accomplishments into sophisticated computer software used by design engineers world-wide. He is also well known for his innovative work in the inherently challenging field of nonlinear analysis. Professor Reddy is the author of 15 books (not counting subsequent editions), over 350 journal publications, and about 500 conference presentations. He is recognized as one of the most cited researchers by ISI Highly Cited Researchers, with more than 10,000 citations and H-index of over 40 to his credit.
Kalyan Annamalai Paul Pepper Professor Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology, 1975 Professor Annamalai is highly regarded among his peers for his research on transition of ignition phase of coal, group combustion of coal and liquid droplets, and gasification of coal and biomass. He and an interdisciplinary team of other professors and graduate students successfully demonstrated the use of feedlot biomass (or animal waste) – a renewable fuel and an alternative to fossil fuel – to reduce the production of CO2 by cofiring with coal, and to reduce emission of NOx and Hg by reburn. Based on their research over many years, Professor Annamalai and his team recently completed a comprehensive feedlot biomass/coal fuel and combustion database that has generated substantial interest in the use of feedlot biomass as an energy source for ethanol production.
Je-Chin Han Distinguished Professor and Marcus C. Easterling Endowed Chair Sc.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1976 Professor Han is a pioneer in the area of high temperature gas turbine blade cooling. With over 30 years of research experience, he has made significant contributions in turbine blade enhanced internal cooling, heat transfer in rotating channel flows, and film cooling in unsteady high-turbulent flows. Based on Professor Han’s research, angled-rib turbulence promoters have replaced earlier internal cooling designs and have become an industry standard. Professor Han’s research has led to advances in the cooling and thermal protection systems that have enabled modern advanced high-efficiency gas turbine engines to operate at very high temperatures. He has published one book and over 360 technical papers, including 170 journal articles. Professor Han received the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award in 2002 and the AIAA Thermophysics Award in 2004.
M. Taher Schobeiri Oscar Wyatt Professor Ph.D., Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, 1978 Professor Schobeiri was the recipient of the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize in 2000 for his contribution to modern advances of turbomachinery as a designer and a researcher. His pioneering research on the modeling of unsteady boundary layer transition was essential for the evaluation of the efficiencies of turbine components. Professor Schobeiri has also developed GETRAN, a generic computer code for simulating nonlinear dynamic behavior of gas turbine engines. In his Turbomachinery Performance and Flow Research Laboratory, Professor Schobeiri has state-of-the-art facilities, including a three-stage, two-loop research turbine, which he designed, for the measurements of gas turbine performance, unsteady flows and boundary layers in turbine cascades, and film cooling effectiveness and heat transfer on rotor blades.
Kumbakonam Rajagopal Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor, and James M. Forsyth Endowed Chair
Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1978 Professor Rajagopal has made seminal contributions to various aspects of continuum mechanics, including classical and non-Newtonian fluid mechanics (stability of the flows of non-Newtonian fluids, boundary layer theories for non-Newtonian fluids, implicit constitutive theories for fluids with pressure- dependent viscosities); electrorheology; elasticity (linear and non-linear theories and novel implicit theories for non-dissipative materials that he has introduced); hypoelasticity; viscoelasticity of both solids and fluids; inelasticity; polymer mechanics; continuum thermodynamics; mechanics of granular materials; and mixture theory. Professor Rajagopal has also published extensively in biomedicine: growth and remodeling of collagenous tissues, modeling of ligaments, tendons and the vasculature; various aspects of cardiovascular mechanics including the modeling of the vasculature, aortic dissection and cardiac edema; various aspects of hemodynamics; and models for biodegradable stents.
Jerald Caton Thomas A. Dietz Professor and Associate Department Head Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1980 Professor Caton has been involved in research activities associated with spark-ignition engines, diesel engines, and gas turbines since 1972. One of the major contributions of his research is the development and use of thermodynamic engine cycle simulations that incorporate the second law of thermodynamics. Professor Caton’s research has led to a systematic understanding of the fundamental thermodynamic opportunities and limitations for advanced internal combustion engines, including the effects of a wide range of engine operating and design parameters. Professor Caton has also recommended a comprehensive set of first law and second law considerations for modern efficient engines. Professor Caton’s research has been sponsored by several national laboratories. He publishes extensively in archival journals, and is a frequent invited speaker on these topics.
Alan Palazzolo Halliburton Foundation Professor and Division Leader, Systems and Controls Ph.D., University of Virginia, 1981 Professor Palazzolo was a recipient of an R&D-100 award for his research contribution to the advances of high temperature magnetic bearing technology. He leads a team of researchers who conduct research in the Vibration Control and Electromechanics Laboratory in the areas of vibration control, rotordynamics, high temperature motors, stress analysis, high performance flywheels, and magnetic bearings. The research has led to breakthroughs in active vibration control of spinning shafts, high energy density flywheels, and in ultra high temperature bearing technology, which have improved energy storage on the International Space Station, magnetic bearing design for aircraft engines, and post filters that suppress EMI for PWM servo amplifiers.
Luis A. San Andrés Mast-Childs Tribology Professor Ph.D., Texas A&M University, 1985 Professor San Andrés leads the Tribology Group at the Turbomachinery Laboratory and conducts research in fluid film bearings, squeeze film dampers, and seals. His research group has developed computational physics models that enabled the technology of allfluid film bearings for cryogenic turbopumps in the early 1990s, squeeze film dampers for gas turbine engines in the late 1990s, and gas film bearings for oil-free microturbomachinery in recent years. These models were validated experimentally. Professor San Andrés has also advanced nonlinear dynamic models as virtual laboratory tools for automotive turbochargers. Professor San Andrés has published over 180 technical papers. He also holds five patents and numerous software copyrights.
Hung-Jue Sue Linda and Ralph Schmidt Professor and Director of Polymer Technology Center Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1988 Professor Sue and his research group have successfully prepared fully exfoliated quantum dots, single-walled carbon nanotubes, and synthetic nanoclay in a variety of solvents and polymer matrices. This unique capability has led to important advances in the fundamental understanding of polymer nanocomposites and in the fabrication of nanodevices. Based on the work of Professor Sue and his research group on scratch and mar behaviors of polymeric materials and coatings, there has been significant progress in the evaluation and improvements of scratch and mar resistance of polymeric materials for various optical and engineering applications, resulting in the establishment of new standards by ISO and ASTM.
Hong (Helen) Liang Professor (beginning in fall 2010) Ph.D., Stevens Institute of Technology, 1992 Professor Liang and her research group develop new methodologies to study surfaces and interfaces of materials. They have pioneered nanofabrication processes that enable better understanding of stress-induced meta-stable phases, and these processes have opened new areas of investigation and have led to the development of new nanostructured materials. A major contribution of Professor Liang’s research is the application of tribology to microelectronics. Using friction to optimize the manufacturing process, chemical-mechanical polishing of integrated chips has become a standard process in the industry. Professor Liang has published three books and more than 120 technical papers. She received a CAREER award from NSF in 2003.
Swaroop Darbha Professor Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1994 Professor Swaroop and his research group have conducted investigations of various aspects of transportation, including advanced safety and inspection systems for air brakes on trucks, traffic flow modeling, and vehicle routing. Recent significant accomplishments credited to Professor Swaroop’s research group include the development of: a prototype model-based diagnostic system that assesses the health of air brakes from brake pressure measurements and brake pedal position; a spatially discrete model for the flow of traffic that overcomes the limitations associated with existing models that treat traffic as a continuum; and the first approximation algorithm for the multiple-depot, multipletraveling-salesman problem.
Xin-Lin Gao Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1998 Dr. Gao has obtained analytical solutions that were not available before to a number of important problems in solid mechanics. In particular, his work on carbon nanotubes, imperfect cellular materials, indentations, nanocomposites, and strain gradient elasticity and plasticity has shed new light on understanding unique behaviors of materials at the micron and nanometer scales. Dr. Gao has published over 100 refereed journal and conference papers on topics that include micro and nanomechanics, multi-scale materials modeling, indentation mechanics, composites (woven fabrics, and polymer and metal matrix nanocomposites), cellular solids, elasticity, viscoelasticity, plasticity, numerical analysis (FEM, Green’s function method, matrix method, Voronoi tessellation, molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo method), experimental mechanics, mechanical design, machining, and materials testing and characterization.
Eric Petersen Leland T. Jordan Career Development (Associate) Professor Ph.D., Stanford University, 1998 Professor Petersen is a recent recipient of an NSF CAREER award for his research on the combustion chemistry and gas dynamics of propulsion and energy systems. He and his students conduct research on solid rocket propellants, kinetics of methane-based fuel blends for gas turbine engines, high-hydrogen fuels, laminar flame propagation at elevated pressures, and advanced nanoparticle additives for fuel and propellant enhancement. Experimental capabilities include a new high-pressure shock tube, an aerosol shock tube for liquid and solid fuels, a flame speed vessel, solid propellant mixing and burning facilities, and measurements at the microsecond time scales with non-intrusive optical diagnostics. MDA, Rolls-Royce, NSF, Siemens, DOE, NASA, and General Electric sponsor Professor Petersen’s research.
Debjyoti Banerjee Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles, 1999 Dr. Banerjee and his research group have conducted experiments to investigate nanoscale transport mechanisms in pool boiling on heated surfaces with carbon nanotubes and silicon nanofins, and have demonstrated significant increases of the boiling heat transfer on the nanostructured surfaces. Dr. Banerjee and his students have also obtained experimental results that showed enhancement of the surface heat fluxes in compact heat exchangers and fin coolers using nanofluids. Using novel nanofabrication and packaging techniques, Dr. Banerjee’s research group has developed temperature nanosensors (thin film thermocouples, or TFT) for studying the spatial distribution and fractal properties of chaotic surface temperature transients during boiling of coolants.
Ibrahim Karaman Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2000 Professor Karaman has received a number of awards, including an NSF CAREER award in 2001, for his research on processing-microstructure-mechanical property relationships in metallic materials (ranging from conventional and magnetic shape memory alloys to bulk ultrafine-grained, nanocrystalline, and glassy materials), and on micro-mechanical constitutive modeling of crystal plasticity, twinning, and martensitic phase transformation. His research group has discovered a new magneto-microstructural mechanism of phase transformation that has led to more than one order of magnitude increase in actuation work output in magnetic shape memory alloys, making these materials superior to piezoelectric and magnetostrictive materials. A bottom-up fabrication technique developed by Professor Karaman’s group has made truly bulk nanocrystalline metals, with ultrahigh strength and ductility, a reality.
Jaime Grunlan Associate Professor (beginning in fall 2010) Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2001 Dr. Grunlan received a CAREER award from NSF in 2007 for his research on the use of stimuli-responsive polymers to control the microstructure of carbon nanotube suspensions and composites. The research was highlighted in the June 2006 issue of Nature Materials. The focus of Dr. Grunlan’s earlier work was on the effect of conformational changes in weak polyelectrolytes on pH. In addition to investigating transport phenomena in polymer nanocomposites, Dr. Grunlan and his research group also conduct cutting-edge research on multifunctional thin films that are built using layerby-layer assembly; clay-based dispersion of nanotubes in epoxy composites; and the tailoring of electrical properties of polymer nanocomposites for sensors, electrostatic dissipation, electromagnetic interference shielding, and as flexible electrodes.
Xinghang Zhang Assistant Professor Ph.D., North Carolina State University, 2001 Dr. Zhang received an NSF CAREER award in 2007 for his research on strengthening and deformation mechanisms in nanotwinned metal films. These nanotwins, with an average twin spacing of a few nanometers, may enable multi-functionality in metals, including high strength, good conductivity, and improved high-temperature thermal stability. Dr. Zhang’s research team also works on sputter-deposited metallic nanolayer films. These films have shown enhanced ion irradiation tolerance and may have potential applications in the nuclear industry and in the aerospace industry. Dr. Zhang’s previous work on mechanical properties of bulk nanocrystalline metals has shown that grain size and distributions may determine their deformation mechanisms.