Among the key components comprising aircraft gas turbines, the advancements in hot sections such as combustors and turbines are deemed to be one of the enabling technologies. In both, active programs incorporating innovative ideas are carried out in the department to lessen pollutant emission from combustors and enhance turbine cooling. Almost every engineering or physical system needs control is some form or another to improve performance as well as robustness with respect to disturbances and model uncertainties. Our research interests include the fundamental techniques for design and analysis of control systems for such diverse applications. The plasma physics group's primary interest is nuclear fusion, particularly new confinement concepts and innovative improvements to tokamaks.
Interests also extend to plasma propulsion.
In the area of new confinement concepts, an ongoing area of investigation is compact toroids, which have the ability to make considerable simplifications in fusion reactor design. Fundamental plasma questions involve helicity conservation and its effect on confinement, and kinetic particles and their effect of stability. Current research involves the use of helicity injection to sustain the current in spherical tokamaks, the acceleration of compact toroids for tokamak fueling, and the development of a transient probe for plasma diagnostics. There is also a significant effort on theoretical analysis and MHD code development. The Aerosonde developed here, was the first UAV to autonomously cross the Atlantic.