Working as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow and now as a research faculty member I have been investigating several unsteady aerodynamic problems, primarily centered around aeroelasticity and flapping-wing propulsion. The work has included analytic and numerical simulations using linearized theory, panel methods and full blown Euler/Navier-Stokes methods, as well as experimental work performed in the Naval Postgraduate School water tunnel and low-speed wind tunnel. The table entries below link to pages summarizing this work, providing images and animations of some of the published results. Use the index to jump to various pages or directly to some of the multimedia subpages.

Just a word of warning when downloading any of the multimedia pages below; the pages are rather graphics intensive, and due to the frame-by-frame nature of JavaScript animation, as opposed to GIF89a animation, a large number of files must be downloaded to complete the animation sequence. If you attempt to play the animation before the document is complete then some of the frames may be missing or incomplete. You can correct this by reloading the incomplete images. Reloading the complete document will not work unless you clear your cache first, since the incomplete images will be grabbed out of cache. The GIF89a format is certainly more efficient for data transfer, but it does not provide the control afforded by JavaScript.

Table of Contents

Unsteady potential-flow panel methods
  Single airfoil code
  Mulitple airfoil code
  Wake interference effects

Aeroelasticity
  Wake impingement on a free airfoil
  Compressible flows; Mach contours
  Compressible flows; entropy generation/convection

Flapping-wing Propulsion
  Unsteady lift and thrust for a flapping wing
    High-frequency deflected wake simulations