FACULTY & STAFF NEWS
UW-Madison
No. 2 in U.S. research
Across all academic fields, UW-Madison conducted more than $900
million worth of research in fiscal year 2006, according to new
statistics released by the National Science Foundation. With science
and engineering research expenditures totaling $832 million, UW-Madison
has claimed the No. 2 spot, climbing from No. 3 in the country
and surpassing the combined campuses of the University of Michigan,
which was No. 2 in fiscal year 2005.
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Assistant Professor Todd
Allen, Materials Science and Engineering Assistant Professors Izabela
Szlufarska and Dane Morgan, and EP Research Professor Kumar
Sridharan, Associate Scientist Mark
Anderson and Assistant Scientist Lizhen
Tan have received approximately $890,000 from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission to study the emissivity of metallic structures and fission
product transport in TRISO (tristructural isotropic) fuels—both
in relation to advanced very-high-temperature nuclear reactor designs.
The researchers hope to determine the role of emissivity on decay heat
transfer from plant structures via radiative heat loss and to predict
the transport of noble and metallic fission products through the TRISO
fuel form.
Professor Fabian
Waleffe (also mathematics), mathematics graduate student Jue Wang
and postdoctoral researcher John Gibson (of Georgia Tech University)
have published clear computational evidence that a newly discovered
class of 3-D unstable traveling wave solutions of the Navier-Stokes
equations scale like the inverse of the Reynolds number for large Reynolds
numbers. That scaling is consistent with recent experiments by a British
group, which showed that the smallest amplitude perturbation necessary
to trigger turbulence in a fluid flowing down a pipe also scaled like
the inverse of the Reynolds number. Waleffe and colleagues show that
the 3-D unstable states have only one mode of instability, and demonstrate
that these states are the “backbone” of a boundary separating
turbulent and laminar flows. Their results imply that those 3-D unstable
states control the transition to turbulence; the discovery may lead
to new ways to control transition to turbulence for various engineering
applications. The group’s paper appeared in the May 18 issue of
the journal Physical Review Letters.
Professor Joseph
Bisognano, director of the UW-Madison Synchrotron Radiation Center,
became chair of the American Physical Society Division of Physics of
Beams in June. Established in 1985, the objective of the division is
to advance and diffuse knowledge regarding the nature and behavior of
beams and instruments for their production and use. He was installed
at the 2007 Particle Accelerator Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
June 25-29.
COE
faculty among the most productive researchers in nation
College of Engineering faculty are among the most productive in
the nation, according to the 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education
Research University Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. The
index compiles overall institutional rankings for 164,843 faculty
at 375 PhD granting universities. The productivity of each faculty
member is measured, although the data are aggregated before being
published. Faculty members can be judged on as many as five factors,
depending on the most important variables in the given discipline:
books published; journal publications; citations of journal articles;
federal-grant dollars awarded; and honors and awards. For each
discipline, Academic Analytics assigns a weight to each variable.
As a discipline, UW-Madison engineering mechanics ranked fifth
and nuclear engineering ranked second. |
