Shaler Awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

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The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering has learned that engineering graduate student Kelsey Shaler was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation earlier this year.

Selection for the honor is based on a graduate student's abilities and accomplishments, as well as their potential to contribute to the vitality of US science and engineering enterprises.

Shaler's fellowship began this past fall. Fellowships are funded for a maximum of three years. Her advisor is Professor Datta Gaitonde

To date, Shaler has spent a significant amount of time researching the stall phenomena that affects a wide range of aerodynamic systems, including fixed wing vehicles, helicopter rotors, and most recently wind turbine design, where optimum blade design should allow change in wind direction without adverse impacts on efficiency or reliability. According to Shaler's research proposal several methods have been recently developed to control stall. Significant interest is now targeted on methods utilizing active-control plasma devices, the most popular being Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) plasma actuators driven by AC waveforms. These actuators create force-based disturbances in the flow that create vortices, forcing the flow to reattach to the airfoil and thus delay stall. Preliminary tests performed at The Ohio State University have shown that nano-second pulsed actuators (NS-DBD) have potential to be more effective at controlling high speed and Reynolds number flows. NS-DBDs create disturbances through thermoacoustic energy, which starts out as thermal energy and is then converted to acoustical energy; it is not known how or why this transition happens or how these disturbances interact with natural flow instabilities to control stall. Given the turbulent nature and nonlinearities of the problem, computational theories must be developed to better understand the phenomena as experimental methods are not a viable alternative. Resulting computational theories, developed and verified through high-performance computing methods, provide a more comprehensive explanation of how flow interactions with NS-DBD flow disturbances could be used to control stall.

Congratulations Kelsey on your Graduate Research Fellowship!

Visit http://www.nsfgrfp.org/about_the_program for more information about NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.

Category: Graduate