Gathering Momentum into the New Millennium: 21st Century as the Foundation

Ahmed K. Noor

Eminent Scholar and William E. LobeckProfessor of Aerospace Engineering,

Old Dominion University

Thus, Dr. Noor commences his article, “Disruptions of Progress” in the November 2005 issue of the Mechanical Engineering magazine. His articles have been featured nine times on the covers of magazines, such as, Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace America. The message is always powerful and intended to define our technological future. In an article we coauthored for the International Journal of Engineering Education, there is an explanation of a NASA–funded engineering environment: “. . . technically skilled workforce who can work across traditional disciplines is a must in these areas. Thus, there is a need to explore bold new approaches and to devise an integrated plan for preserving the knowledge base during these gaps, and effective ways of educating and training a pipeline of workforce. Our Hierarchical Research and Learning Network (HRLN) project is a step in that direction.”

As for the present, structural engineering has already been shaped, in part due to the fruits of his pioneering research reported in hundreds of his journal articles in the fields of advanced design and synthesis environment, advanced learning technology, aerospace structures, structural mechanics, computational mechanics, multiscale modeling, simulation and visualization, and new computing systems. He is one of the most cited authors in engineering as noted in ⟨www.isihighlycited.com⟩.

What better way of acknowledging his immeasurable accomplishments and contributions than dedicating a festschrift issue of the prestigious Journal of Aerospace Engineering to Dr. Noor! That is how we started this journey. Invaluable members of this team effort were Firdaus Udwaida, the technical editor, and Jackie Perry, the managing editor of the Journal. We wanted this issue to be an archival classic with a collection of articles by some of the pioneering researchers, who had a profound impact on aerospace engineering research. To serve this vision, I invited eight colleagues who have had deep marks in today’s aerospace engineering knowledge.

Dr. Dan Inman and his coworkers present an analytical approach to derive the governing partial differential equations of motion, which are decoupled for bending and rotational coordinates of vibrations, and apply this formulation to the truss structure model of an innovative space–based radar antenna. Dr. Victor Birman and his coworker have a solution to prevent a structural failure, based on using stitches only in a part of the structure, where they serve as arrestors of delamination cracks, while the part subject to considerable in–plane loading could remain unstitched. Dr. Carlos Felippa discusses a template approach to the construction of customized mass stiffness pairs for selected applications in structural dynamics. His exposition focuses on adjusting the mass matrix, while a separately provided stiffness matrix is kept fixed.

Dr. Ted Belytschko and his coworker propose a modified constitutive framework and its application to plastic anisotropy, and then provide finite–element–method examples of plates’ and shells’ fracture. Dr. Elishakoff and his coauthor generalize the probabilistic interpretation of the safety factors used in the structural engineering literature to derive four possible definitions of “safety factor” that are based on fuzzy sets.

Dr. Wei Shyy and his graduate students have developed a computational technique for multiphase flow modeling. The main challenge they have tackled is a three–dimensional phase interface, which is tracked explicitly using markers on triangulated surface grid while the field equations are solved using the Cartesian grid. Dr. Ken Morgan and his coworkers report a number of examples simulating three–dimensional, incompressible, turbulent flows on unstructured meshes and using a number of very effective convergence and efficiency improving techniques. Finally, Dr. Prabhat Hajela and his coauthor focus on numerical and analytical tools to model uncertainty and risk in a simulation–based optimal design environment, including cases where the uncertainty does not conform to standard probabilistic distributions.

For me, it was an honor and an unparalleled privilege to work on this project with these renowned scholars. In closing, let me express my deep gratitude to all the authors and the reviewers who have contributed to this special issue. Altogether, we hope that the Journal’s readership will enjoy it.

“Knowledge is experience, everything else is just information.”

Albert Einstein