The Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) supports university research infrastructure essential to high-quality Navy relevant research. The research instrumentation that is necessary to carry out cutting-edge research. MAE Drs. Venkat Narayanaswamy and Kara Peters are both recipients of this year’s DURIP awards from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
Dr. Venkat Narayanaswamy – High Speed Flowfield Imaging
The DURIP award will be used to acquire a high-speed laser system for performing time-resolved velocity field imaging. This tool will significantly broaden our understanding of scramjet propulsion and help develop strategies to widen the scramjet operation to lower Mach numbers. Such an extension in operating Mach number will eliminate several ramjet system components, which in turn will dramatically improve the payload capacity and safety of these platforms. A critical bottleneck in achieving this game-changing leap is the high propensity of the scramjet inlets to stall at low Mach numbers. Hence, this award will help develop a detailed understanding of the dynamic shock/boundary layer interactions within scramjet inlets that contribute to triggering and perpetuating the stall process. The insights from the dynamic flow quantification during engine stall will amalgamate with Venkat’s recent AFOSR YIP grant and yield a transformative understanding of the underlying flow physics. Other than scramjet inlet dynamics, the DURIP award will provide new capabilities to our lab, which includes time-resolved multidimensional radical field imaging in reacting flows, time-resolved gas density imaging in 3D shock-dominated flows, among others. These capabilities place our group in a unique position to advance the future high-speed propulsion technologies.
Dr. Kara Peters – Micro Laser Doppler Vibrometer
This DURIP award will be used to purchase a 3D Microsystem Laser Doppler Vibrometer to characterize the signal transfer to a structural health monitoring (SHM) network of sensors mounted to the surface of naval structures. The equipment will support ongoing research at NCSU, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research to increase the quality of the signals received by the sensors and therefore the quality of the damage identification in the underlying naval structure. This characterization over a broad range of mounting parameters and configurations will permit the optimization of such sensor networks for military applications. By providing micro-scale, 3D displacement resolution, the equipment will provide both the in-plane and out-of-plane measurement of vibration amplitudes for ultrasonic waves in metallic structures and the vibration of the sensors in different excitation modes. These experiments will permit a quantitative measurement of the signal transfer between the host structure and the sensor that is not realizable to-date. The results of these experiments will be used to optimize the signal to noise ratio of various optical fiber sensor-mounting configurations for the nondestructive evaluation of the health of naval structures.