Space and Aeronautical Engineering

Designed for students to complete M.S. degree requirement.

Advanced mechanics of materials analysis and design of thin-walled and light-weight elastic aerospace structures such as airplanes or rockets. Use of 3D elasticity including strain-displacement relations, stress-strain relations, stress transformation, and equations of equilibrium, plane stress and plane strain elasticity, stress concentration factors, aerospace materials and failure criteria, margins of safety analysis, plate bending, structural stability. Torsion and bending of asymmetrical thin-walled sections. Design project. Prerequisites: MEEN 3360 or equivalent and MEEN 4303 or equivalent.

Studies the dynamics of incompressible and compressible flows. Theoretical and approximate solutions for steady and unsteady incompressible flows and steady compressible flows; applications to airfoil, wing and aircraft aerodynamics; introduction to approximate methods for boundary layers; introduction to aerodynamic design concepts. Prerequisites: MEEN 4347, MEEN 3392, equivalent of these or with permission of instructor.

Fundamentals of aerospace vehicles dynamics and control. Rigid body kinematics and dynamics, attitude control, orbital dynamics, maneuvers, and controls. Simulation of aerospace vehicles and control design. Prerequisites: MEEN 4344 or equivalent.

Fundamentals of propulsion. Introduction to combustion and combustors. Performance and cycle analysis of various flight propulsion systems: turbojets, turbofans, turboprops, ramjets, scramjets, rockets, and propellers. Design of supersonic inlets and nozzles. Prerequisites: MEEN 3392, MEEN 3347, MEEN 3348, or equivalent of these.

The course introduces hypersonic flows, including the fundamental physics, shock wave phenomena, aerodynamic heating, and advanced computational methods used for analyzing hypersonic vehicles. Topics covered include shock interactions, boundary layer effects, heat transfer, thermochemical nonequilibrium, and high-temperature gas dynamics.

The course introduces computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with applications in space and aeronautical engineering. Topics include governing equations of fluid dynamics, numerical methods for solving the Naiver-Stokes equations, discretization techniques, turbulence modeling, grid generation, and validation. Emphasis is placed on practical CFD applications for analyzing aerodynamic and space-related flow problems, including high-speed flows and external aerodynamics of aerospace vehicles. Prerequisites: Advisor approval needed.