NC State alumni are some of the most passionate people in the world — passionate about their alma mater, their careers and their impact on future Pack members.
Jack Edwards is a terrific example.
Edwards is a three-time NC State alumnus, having graduated from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) with bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in aerospace engineering in 1988, 1990 and 1992, respectively. After postdoctoral work and a stint as a contractor for NASA’s Langley Research Center, he returned to campus in 1994 as an assistant professor.
Edwards just completed his 30th year as a member of the College of Engineering’s faculty. All told, 41 incredibly eventful years have passed since he first set foot on the Brickyard as an undergraduate.
“I’m pretty much a Wolfpack-lifer,” Edwards joked.
This wealth of experience gives Edwards a unique perspective on what his home department has contributed to the aerospace field and what it promises to accomplish, with the help of philanthropic support, in the future.
The “What”
Edwards’ current work in aerospace engineering is focused on hypersonic flight, or flight at speeds of Mach 5 or faster. That’s five times the speed of sound, or 3,836 mph at sea level.
Hypersonic flight can be achieved using rocket propulsion, but more efficient engine designs can be realized by making use of atmospheric air instead of oxygen stored in the vehicle. There are two main types of these “air-breathing” hypersonic engines: ramjets and scramjets.
A traditional jet engine operates at subsonic speeds, or speeds below Mach 1 (767 mph at sea level). Air comes into the engine at a subsonic speed, mixes with the fuel and combusts, with the resulting propulsion moving the aircraft forward at still-subsonic speed.
A ramjet, in contrast, powers a plane to hypersonic speeds by slowing air down to subsonic speed as it enters the combustor, rapidly burning fuel and expanding the hot gases through a nozzle to supersonic or hypersonic velocities.
Scramjets go a step further by eliminating the need for air to slow down to subsonic speed as it enters the combustor. These can operate up to about Mach 10 (7,673 mph at sea level), whereas ramjets are operable up to about Mach 6 (4,604 mph at sea level).
To put all of this in perspective, a civilian flight utilizing a ramjet or scramjet flying at about Mach 5 could take passengers from Raleigh-Durham International Airport to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in less than three hours.
Achieving this level of hypersonic flight via civilian aircraft was a primary goal of the aerospace industry when Edwards arrived at NC State in the 1980s. The research, however, has largely transitioned toward military applications in the intervening years.
As a result, Edwards and his team work closely with the Department of Defense and NASA on projects that are often categorized as CUI — controlled unclassified information. CUI isn’t quite as hush-hush as the research these organizations conducted during the Cold War, when Edwards was growing up and first became inspired to pursue a career in aerospace engineering, but the categorization does mean that you won’t see many press releases announcing his research findings.
What you will see are the findings borne out around and above you in many different aerospace applications. Edwards’ work is influencing everything from how astronauts might one day reach Earth’s low orbit to how shipping companies deliver cargo around the globe.
Computational fluid dynamics makes this possible. Studying how air flows into, through, out of and around an engine is crucial to ensuring safe and sustainable flight at hypersonic speeds. Edwards employs advanced coding algorithms to create large-scale simulations of how an engine will perform so the physical prototypes will be as close to perfect as possible right from the beginning.
“Basically, you end up with a large number of equations that are coupled together, and ‘large’ means that in some of the calculations I do, you’re trying to solve, maybe, several billion equations simultaneously,” Edwards said. “And you do this over time, because fluid flow can change over time.”
One of the many testing facilities that Edwards partners with is located on NC State’s campus. The College of Engineering’s very own hypersonic wind tunnel allows for testing at Mach 6 for up to 15 seconds. The wind tunnel doesn’t currently allow for combustion testing, but it does enable Edwards to test a model’s flight characteristics and component behavior under the same conditions that ramjet- and scramjet-powered aircraft will face in real use.
While wind tunnels can return important data, they are limited in the kinds of data they can acquire — it is very difficult to “see” inside an operating scramjet placed in a wind tunnel, for example. Edwards’ modeling takes place digitally and can simulate the actual flow patterns within the engine, providing a wealth of data for use in refining and evaluating an engineering design.
His computations begin with a specified flight trajectory, from takeoff to landing, to account for factors such as altitude changes and vehicle speed. These provide the initial conditions for his engine simulations.
All of this contributes to Edwards’ mission of providing as many answers as possible before an aircraft ever leaves the ground.
“We like our techniques to be very predictive,” Edwards said. “We don’t want to take away from experiments or flight tests — we’ll never be able to remove experimentation — but we do want the designer to have a good tool they can try the first time with their new configuration and get, more or less, the correct answer to start with. We’re not there yet, but that’s what my group works toward.”
These calculations require enormous amounts of computing power, though, which is where Edwards’ strong working relationships with NASA and the Department of Defense come in particularly handy. He and his team have access to some of the most advanced computers in the world and can use them to run these hours-long simulations as needed.
The “How”
Edwards’ efforts are, as one might expect from such close ties with NASA and the Department of Defense, supported in large part by government grants. However, federal funding cuts have made these normally stable pipelines less reliable in recent months.
A distinguished professorship has enabled Edwards to continue his work even during these challenging financial conditions.
The Angel Family Distinguished Professorship in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is made possible through the generosity of Steve and Lori Angel and their family’s namesake foundation. Steve is a College of Engineering alumnus himself, having graduated in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering.
The Angels have been generous donors to NC State for many years, especially to Steve’s home college. From their major role in the creation of the Extraordinary Opportunity Scholarship Initiative to helping make Fitts-Woolard Hall a reality and so much more, their impact on the university has been broad and deep.
The Angels’ distinguished professorship extends that impact to, literally, even greater heights via Edwards’ research.
“The previous department head, Dr. Richard Gould, was the one who was instrumental in engineering this professorship with the Angel family,” Edwards said. “Mr. Angel was chairman, president and chief executive officer of Praxair, Inc., from 2007 to 2018, and Praxair is essentially a fluids company. They basically sell compressed gas, and they do lots of other interesting things that are related to what I do, like oxy-fuel torches, acetylene torches, things like this.
“So, Dr. Gould felt like my work, even though it doesn’t quite fit in that space — and you know, there’s never an exact analog with a particular donor — it was very close, and I had had some recent success at that point. I was probably looking pretty good on paper, and it worked out, and it was a great honor. Probably the greatest honor I’ve ever gotten, honestly, by far was being recognized with the Angels’ award.”
Edwards has put the funding provided by the Angels’ distinguished professorship to tremendous use since he was named to the position in 2016, especially when it comes to helping his students succeed.
For instance, Edwards used funds from the distinguished professorship so students could afford to travel to the AIAA SciTech Forum in Orlando, Florida. This annual conference is the largest of its kind in the aerospace engineering world and gives NC State students a chance to meet with representatives from many governmental and civilian organizations — organizations eager to hire the university’s intelligent, hardworking and well-trained alumni.
Funds from the Angels’ distinguished professorship are also being used to cover the in-state tuition for an incoming Ph.D. student this fall, with the student working on simulations of hypersonic engines being tested in a facility in Australia. This is just one example of how distinguished professorships help NC State’s faculty recruit and retain top students even during otherwise difficult funding conditions.
“The professorship makes you feel valued, and it relieves pressure, because there is a decent amount of pressure to sustain your research program,” Edwards said. “Right now, there are a lot of issues with the federal government. No one knows when a new dollar is going to come in and what restrictions are going to be on it.
“You know, I’m sitting here thinking that maybe in a year and a half I’m going to have to pay a lot of our people, until things settle down, using the fund so they can wrap up their research. And that’s all great, because that’s what it’s for. It’s to make sure we get continuity.”
The “Why”
Regardless of what projects Edwards is working on or how he uses the funding from the Angel Family Distinguished Professorship in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering to further them, his focus remains the same. For him, the greatest outcome of being an educator and researcher are the students-turned-colleagues who build on what they learned from him to succeed in their own careers.
It isn’t unusual for Edwards to reconnect with his former students years later and yet not be able to actually discuss their respective efforts because of the cutting-edge or near-cutting-edge nature of the work they do. However, just because Edwards doesn’t know exactly what they are doing on a daily basis doesn’t mean he can’t celebrate their achievements as successful MAE alumni.
“At the end of the day, the research all funnels back and, really, at the core is the students,” Edwards said. “We’re in the people business — we do research, but the main product, the game-changing product, is the people. I view that as the best accomplishment versus any paper, citation, patent, whatever. It’s really the people that you’ve produced.”
For more information on Professor Edwards and his work, visit the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering’s website. To learn more about the Angel Family Distinguished Professorship in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and how you can contribute to its success, click here.
This post was originally published in Giving News.
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