Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering News

MEEM Graduate Seminar April 5th:
Thursday April 5, 2012 4:00-5:00 p.m.
ME-EM building, Room 112

Stephen W. Rouhana
Ford Research & Advanced Engineering

In 2008, Dr. Stephen W. Rouhana was featured in television ads for Ford Motor Company. He obtained a PhD and MS in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received three simultaneous BS degrees in Physics, Mathematics, and Religious Studies (magna cum laude) from Manhattan College.

After 17 years with the General Motors Research Laboratories, he joined Ford Motor Company. He is their Senior Technical Leader for Safety in Research & Advanced Engineering Department. He heads the Biomechanics and Occupant Protection Group in the Passive Safety Research & Advanced Engineering Department and serves as Chairman of the Occupant Safety Research Partnership; a consortium formed in 1992 by Ford, General Motors and Chrysler for research on advanced crash test dummies. His areas of interest are impact biomechanics, the development of crash test dummies, injury assessment strategies and advanced safety concepts.
As a SAE Fellow, he Chairs the SAE Impulse Noise Task Force of the Inflatable Restraints Standards Committee and the SAE Dummy Abdomen-Pelvis Round Robin Task Force. Dr. Rouhana is a member of the Stapp Car Crash Conference Advisory Committee and is on the Editorial Board of the Stapp Car Crash Journal. He serves on the Industrial Advisory Board of the Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (C-ChIPS) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and on the External Advisory Board for the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine (AAAM), the American Society of Biomechanics, and Sigma Xi (the National Research Honor Society).

In 2003, he was awarded the US Government Award for Safety Engineering Excellence, “In recognition of and appreciation for exceptional scientific contributions in the field of motor vehicle safety engineering and for distinguished service to the motoring public”. In 2011, he received the Award of Merit (the highest technical award) from the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. In 2012 he became a Fellow in AIMBE. He is a two time recipient of the John Paul Stapp Award and the SAE Arnold W. Siegel Awards. Additional awards include the SAE Ralph H. Isbrandt Automotive
Safety Engineering Award, the SAE Arch T. Colwell Merit Award, the General Motors Research Laboratories Charles L. McCuen Special Achievement Award and General Motors’ highest technical honor, the Charles F. Kettering Award. He has 7 patents with another 3 pending

Engineering Considerations in Automotive Safety – A Case Study in Ford’s Inflatable Seat Belts

Automotive manufacturers consider numerous factors when designing their vehicles. Among these factors, biomechanical considerations are an integral part of the development of new safety systems. The process of developing a new safety system includes identifying a potential realworld safety enhancement, obtaining basic biomechanical knowledge, developing a design concept, building prototypes of the concept, testing the prototypes, and assessing potentially adverse effects. That process will be the focus of this discussion, using the development of the world’s first production automotive inflatable safety belt system as an example. This talk will
also touch on the current state of automotive safety and some of the emerging trends for future consideration by vehicle safety researchers.

MEEM Graduate Seminar: Thursday March 29, 2012 4:00-5:00 p.m.
ME-EM building, Room 112

Hong G Im
Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan

Professor Hong G. Im received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Seoul National University in 1986, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Seoul National University in 1988, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1991 and 1994, respectively. After graduation, he spent two years as a Research Fellow at the Center for Turbulence Research, Stanford University, followed by a post-doctoral tenure at the Combustion Research Facility, Sandia National Laboratories from 1996 to 1999. He joined the University of Michigan in January 2000 in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he currently holds a Professor position. Hong Im’s research and teaching interests are primarily fundamental and practical aspects of combustion and power generation devices using high-fidelity computational modeling. Recent research topics include modeling of combustion in low temperature combustion engines, advanced models for turbulent sooting flames, and combustion characteristics of high hydrogen content fuels for advanced gas turbine applications. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2002 and SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award in 2006. He is an Associate Fellow of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and serves as an Associate Editor for the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute.

UNDERSTANDING AUTO-IGNITION AND COMBUSTION CHARACTERISTICS THROUGH HIGH-FIDELITY SIMULATION
Recent advances in the massively parallel computing technology have enabled first principle simulations of laminar and turbulent reacting flows to unravel fine-scale physics with ultimate realism and accuracy. To achieve this mission successfully, however, it is essential to develop reliable algorithms that are free from turbulence modeling errors and numerical dissipation.
Furthermore, the implemented submodels should be able to describe the essential physical and chemical processes, such as radiative heat transfer, spray dynamics, and soot formation. This presentation will provide an overview of recent research activities using direct numerical simulations (DNS) with detailed chemistry and transport. In particular, DNS of auto-ignition in the presence of mixture stratification is analyzed to provide insights into the characterization of
auto-ignition regimes and as a means to develop improved mixing models for turbulent combustion simulations.

Funding for the ME-EM Graduate Seminar Series is provided by Professional Plating, Inc. of Anoka, MN www.proplate.com
and the Department of Mechanical Engineering – Engineering Mechanics www.me.mtu.edu/seminar