AMEnewsThe annual newsletter serving the students and alumni of the University of Oklahoma School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Fall 2011 - Volume 4 Issue 9

In this Issue

Student Team Rankings.................1AME Faculty and Staff....................2Letter From the Director...............2Big 12 Nuclear Engineering Consortium......................................3Student Wins University-Wide Research Award.............................3

Seeing the Symphony...................4Aruna and J.N. Reddy Graduate Student Travel Fellowship...........5Featured AME Alum......................6BP Scholarship Winners...............7Robot Recruitment........................9

Faculty Recognition......................8Development...................................8

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AME Student Teams End Successful Competition Year

Design/Build/FlyDBF ranked 55 out of 71 teams at the 15th annual DBF Competition this summer in Tuscon, Ariz.

Sooner Off RoadThis Summer, SOR competed in Peoria, Illinois where the team ranked sixth in hill climb and 16th in acceleration, and took the third best score on the design report.

Sooner Powered VehicleTook sixth place in their competition this year.

Sooner Racing TeamSRT finished second place overall at the Formula SAE - West competition in Fontana, Calif. Sixty-one teams from eight countries competed at the competition. Along with the overall title, SRT finished fourth in Engineering Design, 13th in Business Sales Presentation, 19th in Cost and 10th in acceleration, sixth in the Autocross event, fifth overall in Endurance, and also won the skidpad event

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School of Aerospace and Mechanical EngineeringCollege of Engineering

Faculty and Staff

Full-Time FacultyM. Cengiz AltanPeter AttarJ. David BaldwinKuang-Hua ChangRong Zhu GanS.R. GollahalliKurt GramollTakumi HawaF.C. LaiWilson E. Merchàn-MerchànDavid P. MillerFarrokh MistreeKumar ParthasarathyMrinal C. SahaZahed SiddiqueLi SongHarold L. StalfordAlfred G. StrizPrakash Vedula

StaffLawana DillardAssistant to the Director

Debbie MattaxFinancial Associate

Vicki PollockStaff Assistant

Suzi SkinnerStudent Services Coordinator

Sarah WarrenCommunications Coordinator

Shop PersonnelBilly MaysGreg Williams

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Letter From the Director

Farrokh Mistree, Ph.D.Director, AME

Thank you for staying engaged with the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. It has been a good year marked by financial prioritizing amidst a lean budget, but also a year of achievements and new strategic partners. One thing is certain: AME is on the move!

Our faculty continues to win awards, receive grants and make a difference in the lives of students. Likewise, our students have had a standout year, as well.

The Board of Advisors has worked to develop AME’s already-strong research infrastructure, help us to continue working toward our Strategic Plan, and recruit new strategic partners.

We have several new BoA members, including Sammy Haroon and Dave Wagie, Ph.D. Sammy is an executive specializing in innovation. Dave is the director of aerospace and economic development for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. He is the former provost of St. Gregory’s University in Shawnee and former dean of faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

In January, I accompanied a group of faculty from OU to Gujarat, India, where we signed a memorandum of understanding with Gujarat Technological University and Pandit Deen Dayal University. We agreed to foster relationships beneficial to all parties and to provide students and faculty with exchange opportunities.

This summer we prepared for our accreditation self-study, which occurs every six years. We’ve sent in our reports and await guests from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology in late October. Our reports show us to be on a course of continuous improvement.

As the school faces a lean budget, needs remain. Specifically, AME is working with donors to help provide funding and resources to undergraduate and graduate students, to support faculty, to fund much-needed renovations to labs and graduate student offices, and to generously give to the Director’s Discretionary Fund so that AME can meet financial obligations as they arise.

Please keep up with us either by visiting the school, attending an e-Club cookout during a home football game, following us on Facebook or sending us an email.

Join us, the AME family, as we make positive contributions to Oklahoma’s economic and intellectual capital and strive to meet the goals set out in our strategic plan.

Positive Thoughts,

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AME Professors Join Colleagues to Discuss the Big 12 Engineering Consortium

Student Receives Undergraduate Research Award

AME faculty Li Song and Takumi Hawa recently joined a group of faculty from engineering schools throughout the Big 12 at the San Diego Naval Base in San Diego, to discuss the Big 12 Engineering Consortium while embarked on an eight-hour excursion in a nuclear-powered submarine.

The Big 12 Engineering Consortium is a course-sharing program created in 2007 that provides increased access for engineering students throughout the Big 12 to high-demand engineering fields by combining the strengths of Big 12 engineering programs.

The Consortium’s new Nuclear Engineering Program addresses the need for engineering graduates who have an understanding of nuclear engineering. The program allows undergraduate engineering majors from Big 12 universities to study nuclear engineering through fully online courses from the universities within the conference offering nuclear engineering degrees – Iowa State University, Kansas State University, Texas A&M University, University of Kansas, University of Missouri-Columbia, and the University of Texas at Austin. The program will give students access to the most knowledgeable faculty on nuclear engineering in the Big 12, and is part of the sharing-to-gain philosophy becoming increasingly prevalent within institutions of higher learning.

While aboard the submarine, the group of faculty ventured 20 miles out to sea, reaching a depth of 600 feet at a steep 25-degree descent. As part of the submarine crew, Song, Hawa and the other faculty members completed fire training, where they learned how to be a part of the sub’s firefighting crew – no one is exempt from this important job, not even professors. They also endured a pipe burst simulation, learning how to fix busted pipes in the frigid deep-sea water.

To learn more about the Big 12 Engineering Consortium, visit www.big12engg.org.

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Recent AME Aerospace Engineering graduate Cory Morton received the Distinguished Undergraduate Research Award, a university-wide award presented to eight participants of Undergraduate Research Day. Along with $150, Morton received campus-wide recognition for his research achievements.

Working with AME professors S.R. Gollahalli and Ramkumar Parthasarathy, Morton researched the combustion characteristics of pool fires of biofuels.

“I felt honored to have received the award, and it gave me confidence in my ability to present to a crowd,” said Morton.

The ability to perform research as an undergraduate student has given him insight to how his studies are applied outside of course work.

“It allowed me to enhance my studies by applying them in an experimental environment,” he said.

Morton is now an AME graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in aerospace engineering with a specialization in aerospace propulsion.

By Sarah Warren

Rethinking Hearing LossUniversity faculty and researchers generally garner recognition

for their work in the form of awards, research grants and attention within academic circles and industry insiders. But AME professor Rong Gan, Ph.D., gets an even higher honor – fan mail.

When articles about Gan’s research on solutions for hearing loss appear in newspapers and magazines, letters pour in like clockwork from across the country. Usually from someone concerned about an elderly parent, nearly every letter reads something like this: I read about your research. I will drive my father or mother from any distance to see you. Please work me into your schedule.

With research like Gan’s, the fan mail is no surprise. Her research measures sound and vibration transmission through the ear and is transforming hearing technology.

Gan began her career as a traditional mechanical engineer, work-ing in car manufacturing for years. It was that foundation that instilled in her the fundamentals of mechanical engineering, spe-cifically those related to movement, because as her research proves, mechanical principles of movement are essential to the hearing pro-cess.

Gan transplanted her mechanical engineering experience into the realm of biomedical engineering when the father of biomedi-cal engineering, Y.C. Fung, asked her to study under him through Michael Yen at the University of Memphis and earn her doctorate.

Gan was intrigued by the prospect of helping people through the same discipline that helped her design cars.

Harnessing the Mechanics of HearingYears, post-doctoral research appointments and millions of dol-

lars in grants later, Gan is a preeminent biomedical engineer with knowledge that includes pulmonary circulation and the respiratory system. Today, she and her team at the University of Oklahoma and the Hough Ear Institute in Oklahoma City research what was for years the great mystery of hearing – the symphonic relation-ship between sound’s movement through the ear and the inner ear’s subsequent movement with sound frequencies, which, working in harmony together, actually creates hearing.

Gan developed a groundbreaking computer modeling program that creates 3-D computational models of the human ear for sound transmission. The program led to a new understanding of auditory frequencies, ear movement and functionality. The developments allowed her and her fellow researchers to literally view hearing and harness the mechanics of the ear. Gan and her team are preparing to license the software so other researchers can benefit from it.

This leap forward by Gan and her team led to developing hearing technology that does not simply amplify noise, but works in har-mony with the movement of the ear and sound frequencies. The totally implantable hearing system (TIHS) is completely invisible from the outer ear, and it overcomes drawbacks of traditional hear-ing technology like unsatisfactory sound quality, undesired sound

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Seeing the Symphony AME Professor Rong Gan Tackles Hearing Loss

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distortion, blocking of the external ear canal and acoustic feedback. The project has not been without difficulties. The team continu-ously works to overcome three distinct project challenges:

1. Minimizing patient risk by developing a system that can be sur-gically implanted with minimal disruption to the nerves around the ear while also being the right size for the inner ear, and that has a lifetime of usefulness so it never has to be removed. 2. Ensuring the cost/benefit ratio is comparable to traditional digital hearing aids3. Enhancing the device’s efficiency so it can be used for both mild and profound hearing loss. TIHS is still in the early phases. While the team makes progress

daily, the TIHS is not close to receiving approval from the Federal Drug Administration, and is not ready for product testing. Gan faithfully responds to every email from those anxious to be in a TIHS trial with this information.

Hearing the Rest of the StoryWhile Gan’s research is the stuff of dreams for many who suf-

fer from hearing loss, her personal history is closer to the stuff of legend.

Gan was born and raised in China. As a young man, her fa-ther, Yi Gan, left China to study in the West. He received both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Cambridge and studied at military academies in the United States and the United Kingdom.

When World War II broke out, he returned to China and was ap-pointed a major general. He was instrumental in protecting China’s borders from Japan, and by the war’s end, was a national hero.

In 1949 the war was long over and General Gan settled in for quiet life in higher education, but China’s Cultural Revolution and

its anti-intellectual views deterred those plans. Because of his West-ern education, General Gan was deemed an enemy of the people. Along with 550,000 others, General Gan was given the distinction of being a Rightest, which meant the government considered him at risk of having pro-capitalism, anti-communist views.

General Gan was imprisoned from 1955 to 1956, and again from 1969 to 1976.

“The suffering...” Gan said when sharing the dates of her father’s imprisonment. “He suffered so much.”

During many of the years he was imprisoned, Gan and her fam-ily had no idea where her father had been taken, if he was still alive, and if he would return.

General Gan did return. When the Cultural Revolution ended in the mid ’70s, he was released. He resumed his quiet life in aca-demia as a university vice president.

In 2010, at the age of 97, General Gan died. After the dramatic twists of fate throughout his life, he died a national hero. Gan re-turned to her homeland to organize her father’s state funeral.

General Gan’s legacy and love for education lives on in both America and China. After the Cultural Revolution, Gan and her siblings all came to the United States to finish their educations. Today, Gan’s daughter, nephews and niece are all current or future professors. General Gan and his late wife left their estate to an organization that helps educate poor children in China’s rural vil-lages

Rong Gan, like every faculty member at the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, brings a unique background and personal perspective to her research and teaching. For Gan, that involves a family legacy that embraces and even sacrifices for educa-tion, and the need to make a difference in the lives of people.

As the fan mail suggests, Gan, like her father, is already a hero to many.

Former Faculty Creates ScholarshipFormer AME faculty member J.N. Reddy and his wife, Aruna, recently presented AME with a

$15,000 gift to establish the Aruna and J.N. Reddy Graduate Student Travel Fellowship. The schol-arship will provide the needed funding for AME graduate students traveling to academic confer-ences, where they can present research findings, learn from their peers and meet fellow researchers.

Reddy, currently a professor at Texas A&M University, came to the University of Oklahoma in 1975. During his five-year tenure at OU, Reddy not only was promoted to associate professor, but also built the foundation of a lifelong friendship with his colleague, S.R. Gollahalli. It was through this friendship that Reddy learned of AME’s need to fund graduate student travel.

“The scholarship just made sense,” said Reddy. “After all, it’s really about giving graduate students every opportunity to succeed, We all reap the rewards of engineers serving in areas such as petro-chemical, energy, transportation, communication and aerospace.”

Although it’s been years since Reddy was part of the AME faculty, he still has a special connection with AME. “This was my first academic position. The faculty colleagues were so friendly and the atmosphere was very conducive to good teach-

ing and research. These initial conditions made a big impact on my career,” said Reddy. To learn how you can create or contribute to scholarships, contact Jill Hughes, executive director of Development for the OU College

of Engineering, at (405) 325-5217.

Aruna and J.N. Reddy

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Aaron Beese’s sense of adventure has paved the way for a life of adventure within the field of mechanical engineering. While an honors student at AME, Beese helped found AME’s first Human Powered Vehicle team and created a single-wheeled bicycle cargo trailer which accompanied him on a bicycle trip from Virginia to Alaska for his honors thesis.

In 2009, after a year of marriage, Beese and his wife, Laura (Music Education, 2005), quit their jobs and began the adventure of a lifetime: a trek on a semi-recumbent tandem bicycle to the centroid, or geographic center, of every state in the United States With a few states still to go, they’ve now settled down in Oregon, where Beese is a design engineer for Burley Design.

How has your education at AME made you successful in your career?The biggest contributors were the opportunities I had for hands-on design projects. When building the trailer for my honor’s thesis, the design and analysis aspect of the project were made possible by Dr. Chang’s CAD/FEA courses. Billy Mays and the machine shop guys gave extensive guidance during the fabrication stage. Working on the first Sooner Powered Vehicle team was the most comprehensive, most challenging and most fun work I did during my undergraduate education.

What were some of the high points of your trip to the centroid of every state?Many times, our quest for the geographic center took us into the lives of the people who lived or worked at the center. In Missouri and Kansas, the center was on a farm that had been in one family for over a century; in both places we met four generations of the family who still lived and worked the farm. Rhode Island was the only state (so far) whose center was indoors: it was inside a small independent music store, where we spent several hours chatting with the owner and his wife. In Delaware, the family living nearest to the center invited us to stay all day so that we could take part in their large family crab bake that evening; in the morning, they took us to the nearby plant where space suits and blimps are made.

Our plan was for a two-year journey, with two breaks during the winters. I saw an alumni profile in the College of Engineering alumni magazine about petroleum engineering alumna, Claire Wilson, who runs a coffee farm on the big island of Hawaii. After some correspondence, Claire agreed to employ Laura and me as part-time coffee pickers. The time in Hawaii was one of the most special parts of our trip, and it was all made possible by the the generosity of a fellow alumna.

How far have you and Laura traveled together?We’ve biked 45 states and 17,000 miles. We feel like we’ve experienced more together in a few years than many people do in a lifetime.

What advice would you give to an AME student who has interests he or she is trying to tie into engineering?I think the most important thing is to take a proactive role in shaping your own education. The degree curriculum is a framework, but your education will be much richer if you fill it out and make it your own. In my experience, the people at OU were eager to allow students to tailor their studies toward their interests, and if you can propose a plan, they are happy to help you find a way to implement that plan.

Q&A with Aaron BeeseBachelor’s of Science, Mechanical Engineering, 2003Featured Alum:

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AME Snapshot: Graduate Students Receive BP Summer Scholarship

FellowsFellows American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Janet K. Allen (School of Industrial Engineering)M. Cengiz AltanSub GollahialliFeng LaiFarrokh MistreeShivakumar Raman (School of Industrial Engineering)

Associate Fellows American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)Sub GollahalliFeng LaiFarrokh MistreeRamkumar ParthasarathyAlfred Striz

Three AME masters students received summer scholarships from British Petroleum. With funding from the scholarships, Yunxiang Wang, Dustin Baker and Gerardo Conanan were able to conduct graduate studies and research during the summer. The students pre-sented their research to representatives from BP this fall.

(Above) Gerardo Conanan presents his research focusing on the optimal design of a novel gas pump, which utilizes corona wind. The salient feature of this new pump is that it does not have a moving part, makeing it nearly maintenance free.

(Right) Yunxiang Wang presents his research, Structural Design Optimiza-tion Using Bridging Scale Decomposition Method.

AME Director Receives ASME Design Award

Celebrating AME Development

For his lifelong dedication and contribution to the engineering design community and to design education, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers has honored AME Director Farrokh Mistree with the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award.

According to ASME, the annual award, which was established in 1998, “recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.”

“I love being a professor. To be recognized by my colleagues for something I love doing is both humbling and simply awesome,” said Mistree.

As LA Comp Chair and director of the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering since 2009, Mistree continues to impact students in engineering design fields. He has taught at universities around the world, including the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was the founding director of the Systems Realization Laboratory, and the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Mistree has spent his career pursuing his passion: to have fun in defining the emerging discipline of complex systems, in defining new education paradigms anchored in competency-based education that encourages students to pursue careers in academia, and in providing an opportunity for highly

motivated and talented people to learn how to define and achieve their dreams. As an ardent educator, researcher, technical leader, adviser and mentor, Mistree has inspired countless students to study engineering design and, more importantly, to learn how to learn.

Dear AME Family,From the $500,000 in research grants brought in this summer alone by AME faculty, to undergraduate and graduate student research accomplishments, AME students and faculty continue to excel. We are excited to offer new scholarship, such as the Aruna and J.N. Reddy Graduate Student Travel Fellowship, which will allow more graduate students to present their research at national conferences. As with many scholarships and donations to AME, this scholarship matches the experience of the donor with a genuine need for fund-ing within AME.

AME continues to work diligently to meet the needs of students and faculty. Current AME needs are four-fold:

• Scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students • Awards for mid-level faculty• Renovation funds for labs and graduate student offices• Discretionary funds for the AME director to address short-term, strategic op-

portunities

Please contact me at jillq@ou.edu or (405) 325-5217 to learn how easy it is to invest in AME. Or, you can make a gift online by visiting www.coe.ou.edu and click “make a gift”. You can always mail your contribution, made out to the OU Foundation, at 100 Tim-berdell Road, Norman, OK 73019-0685 and note AME on your check.

Thank you, and Boomer Sooner,

Jill HughesCollege of Engineering Executive Director of Development

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One Professor’s Project Means Top Students for AME

(Left): Matthew Oelke and David Miller demonstrate a robot from a previous competition.(Below): KISS employee and OU engineering student Zachary Morris builds pieces for next year’s Botball competition.(Below): Tim Corbly, KISS employee and OU freshman, welds pieces for next year’s Botball competition.

For AME professor and KISS Institute for Practical Robotics co-founder David Miller, a unique privilege of founding and championing the Botball program through the years is seeing Botball students pursue undergraduate or graduate degrees at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.

One student who has traveled full circle through the Botball program is OU senior Matthew Oelke, from Norman, Okla. As a high school student, Oelke had dreams of studying architecture, but on a whim, joined the Botball team at Norman High

School. He was hooked. Botball combined the mechanical and aesthetic aspects of architecture, but it also incorporated computers and technology, a combination that Oelke realized suited him.

“Botball is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. I learned to not be afraid to jump in and start doing something and to ask for help if I needed it.”

Apart from the technical expertise gained from the actual robotics competition, Oelke learned two important skills that have helped him succeed at OU: leadership and time management.

“In Botball we would have to decide on a strategy as a team and all be working toward the same goals. Throughout the process we would have new, better ideas on how to accomplish our tasks, but if we did not have enough time to properly build and test it, we could not use it.”

When it was time to choose a college, Oelke already had a plan. “I applied to OU because I knew that I would be able to continue participating in Botball in some way,” he said.

Upon entering OU, Oelke was a mechanical engineering major with the goal of designing robots after graduation. Because he wanted to incorporate both mechanical and electrical engineering into his studies, he eventually switched his major to multidisciplinary studies, a university-wide major that allows students to create an individualized study plan.

Botball has shifted Oelke’s career goals. Originally wanting to work for a large robotics company, he now hopes to work at KIPR after graduation because there he not only gets to design and build robots, but also watch how his efforts positively impact middle and high school students.

Dr. Miller is just one of many AME faculty members who invest their time in service throughout all levels of engineering. Not only do faculty service activities benefit the community, they also help draw the best students to AME.