The Rotorcraft Centers of Excellence (Part Four)

Penn State

Ten projects proposed by Penn State were selected by the NRTC, resulting in $600K per year of government funding, to be matched by $450K year by the university. Penn State, located in University Park, Pennsylvania, is teamed with North Carolina A&T, in Greensboro, North Carolina, for the RCOE grant.

Dr. Ed Smith, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering, is the Director of the Penn State Rotorcraft Center. For nearly 30 years, Professor Barnes McCormick was the primary educator and the focal point of helicopter activity at Penn State. Dr. McCormick, who has authored several comprehensive textbooks, still organizes an annual week-long Rotorcraft Technologies Short Course, which has been offered continuously for over 15 years. During the past five years alone, over 200 rotorcraft professionals have registered for this popular short course. Since 1992, the College of Engineering has also hired four tenure track Aerospace Engineering faculty members in the rotorcraft area (Smith in 1992, Farhan Gandhi in 1995, and Joe Horn and Ken Brentner in 2000).

In 1996, Penn State was finally able to reach the RCOE echelon by capitalizing on its rotorcraft expertise at a time when Rennselear’s RCOE had lost its leadership. With lots of encouragement from industry and the government laboratories, Dr. Smith was able to work with his colleagues to build the team necessary to put together a competitive proposal. Although they received a relatively small grant, the 1996-2000 RCOE award has allowed the university to build an excellent program over the past five years. Over 30 graduate students and 10 faculty currently work at the Penn State Rotorcraft Center (see faculty sidebar) with $2M of total annual research funding. According to Dr. Smith, Penn State has a number of technology specialists – such as Professors Lyle Long (CFD) Kon-Well Wang (active structural control) and Bill Mark (gear analysis) – working in many key areas: "We try to act as a magnifying glass and focus these experts onto the most challenging rotorcraft problems."

Since late 1997, the PSU Rotorcraft Center has been operating from 3000 sq ft of dedicated central student and benchtop testing laboratory space. The university felt it was urgent to get a central, identifiable home for the labs, and moved around departments on campus to make room for the facilities. This space is now home to 25 students, a computer lab, a conference room, and the lab. The co-location of the students and resources has resulted in enhanced cohesiveness within the team. This was also a bold statement that the university was serious about re-establishing itself in the rotorcraft area.

The Penn State Rotorcraft Center strives for close interactions with industry and government laboratories. During the past five years, Penn State has had experience with a number of technology transfer mechanisms and joint projects. This has helped the Rotorcraft Center secure substantial additional research funding: roughly $1.5 million per year beyond the RCOE funding. As with UMD AGRC and GT CERT, this is exactly what the NRTC grants are intended to do: create a "magnet effect" that a Rotorcraft Center of Excellence can use to pull in additional research. During the past several years, PSU has been working on research for Boeing, Sikorsky, Bell, Lord Corp., UTRC, the Army, and the Navy.

The Penn State RCOE research leverages resources and shared facilities with their Center for Acoustics and Vibration (CAV), Institute for High Performance Computing Applications (IHPCA), Composites Manufacturing Technology Center (CMTC), and Materials Research Laboratory (MRL). They have also developed productive relationships with the Condition Based Maintenance Department and National Center for Advanced Drivetrain Technologies, both part of the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory (ARL).

Dr. Smith states, "A hallmark of our center is that you’ll find almost all of our projects have multiple faculty members collaborating with multiple students on a single project…. This pairs a formally trained rotorcraft specialist, who knows the helicopter or tiltrotor system, together with a technology specialist – maybe in structural dynamics or airfoil design or computational acoustics or active control – and that lets us make very rapid progress because you get two researchers pooling their backgrounds. We try to operate that along the lines of how a modern company might pull together an integrated team of engineers to work on a certain problem: one from dynamics, one from aerodynamics, one from design, etc."

PSU is also funded by the ARO MURI grant for active control of rotorcraft vibration and aeroacoustics at approximately $200K per year. Key research areas are rotor design and control for blade vortex interaction, coupled computational aeroacoustics and aeroelasticity of rotors using parallel computers, active control of coupled rotor-drivetrain-airframe dynamics, piezo tube actuators.

Penn State also continues its strong support of the RCOE. The university invested $250K in the new Rotorcraft Center offices, and is providing $250K of cost sharing for the MURI. The university is also cost-sharing (at 50%) on all new equipment. This equipment includes a scanning laser vibrometer, elastomer test equipment, tailboom-driveshaft active control testbed, magnetic bearing driveline test stand, high capacity shakers, and graphics workstations.

The Penn State multi-purpose wind tunnel is designed for low turbulence experimentation. The test section is removable and can be operated in the open jet mode. A major capability of the laboratory is the 3-dimensional laser Doppler anemometer. Other smaller rigs and labs that have recently come online include a custom-designed RC helicopter hover performance stand and a Scale Model Helicopter Driveline Test Facility, a benchtop ground resonance rig, computing arrays, Smart Structures Actuator Development and Evaluation Laboratory, Structural Dynamics and Control Lab, Elastomeric and Shape Memory Alloy Test Facility, High Frequency Vibration and Noise Test Facility, and a Noise Control Laboratory.

PSU is also continuing to build up impressive experimental and computational facilities to support the Rotorcraft Center research and education goals. For the new grant, PSU will also have new avionics facilities and hardware, a new icing wind tunnel and a new flight controls lab. A Fully Instrumented Helicopter Rotor Test Stand Facility was donated by Boeing in March 2000. This test stand will be able to test 6-10 ft diameter wind tunnel models with a six component dynamic balance of the drive system, hubs and blades. It also has a unique optical blade motion measurement system. Boeing is also providing technical support. A new Scale Model Driveline Dynamics Test Facility came online in Fall 2000, and a 6 ft dynamically scaled model of the AH-64 with magnetic bearing active control has also been constructed.

Penn State uses field trips to make sure the students have frequent contact with rotorcraft industry and other educational venues. Located in central Pennsylvania, Penn State is about 3 ½ hours from Boeing Philadelphia, the American Helicopter Museum, Agusta Aerospace, and Keystone Helicopters. They are also within five hours of Sikorsky, Naval Air Station Patuxent River and NASA Glenn. According to Dr. Smith, "We try to think of our mission as providing an exciting and very effective educational environment for the next generation of rotorcraft engineers. So that means a very vibrant AHS Chapter and course work and projects and a lot of things beyond just publishing papers. We don’t see our mission fully complete unless the students we train actually go on and work in rotorcraft…. We may have done the research work and satisfied the sponsor and trained the student, but if the student floats off, it’s not a 100% win. We really do think our whole existence as a center is predicated on creating this kind of training environment."

AHS Home Page

© 2001 American Helicopter Society, International