LU among 3 Missouri schools awarded NASA grant

Lincoln University will join St. Louis' Washington University in helping Rolla-based Missouri University of Science and Technology do research on "turbulence modeling," as part of a $750,000 grant NASA has awarded the Rolla school.

The NASA grant will help Missouri S&T administer and develop new approaches and computational models for predicting turbulence in aircraft flow fields, according to a news release from the Rolla school.

Ramesh K. Agarwal, Ph.D., Washington University's William Palm Professor of Engineering and director of the university's aerospace research and education center, is the lead scientific investigator on the project.

Make El-Dweik, Ph.D., LU assistant professor of physics, will lead the Jefferson City school's share of the project work.

David W. Riggins, Ph.D., Missouri S&T's Curators' Teaching Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is the grant's project administrator.

Riggins also serves as director of the NASA Missouri Space Grant Consortium and the NASA Missouri EPSCoR program - both based at the Rolla school.

Missouri is one of 15 states to receive funding in 2014 through NASA's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, or EPSCoR.

The program supports basic research and technology development in areas considered relevant to NASA's mission.

The project involves the development and assessment of an improved turbulence model for the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations, which are time-averaged equations of motion for fluid flow.

In the aerospace industry, solving RANS equations is the most widely used approach for predicting turbulent flows encountered by aircraft.