KU engineer's breakthrough will help U.S. Air Force improve efficiency

LAWRENCE -- How much longer can the U.S. Air Force rely on some of its aging aircraft? How are its planes holding up to the extremely high temperatures and pressures that occur during supersonic flights?

Karan Surana, Dean E. Ackers distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Kansas, is helping the Air Force answer these -- and many other -- questions through his groundbreaking research in the field of computational mathematics.

The armed forces and industry alike rely on simulations created by computational mathematics to help solve a wide range of problems, such as determining how long aging aircrafts will last or how well composite materials can withstand high temperatures.

The complex mathematics help scientists find answers on paper, rather than spending time, money and other resources to get the same answers in the lab.

"The Air Force would like to minimize testing and experiments," Surana said. "They want to perform numerical simulations whenever possible and be able to say with assurance that what they are getting is what happens in reality."

Unfortunately, that assurance doesn't exist in the traditional framework for computational mathematics. A lot of guesswork is involved, and scientists often end up testing and modifying prototypes because there is too much room for error with current numerical simulations.

Surana's revolutionary research in computational mathematics, however, promises to remove these uncertainties.

"All the ad hoc fixes that people use these days to make computations work will be eliminated in the mathematical framework I am proposing," he said.

Surana's framework for running numerical simulations is much more accurate because it relies on three parameters instead of the two parameters that scientists currently use.

His breakthrough has caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense, which recently awarded Surana a Defense Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR) grant. The grant will enable him to help the Air Force improve its numerical simulations. Matching funds from the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corp. bring the grant total to $750,000 for three years. Peter TenPas, associate professor of mechanical engineering at KU, is a co-principal investigator on the project.

Like any revolutionary idea, Surana's first encountered resistance among his peers. However, his case was bolstered when one of the field's most prominent scientists, J.N. Reddy, distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University, supported Surana's new framework.

That support was echoed in a letter to the DEPSCoR steering committee from Arnold Mayer, principal aeronautical engineer for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, which will be the first benefactor of this research.

"... The technology emerging from Professor Surana's discoveries, when fully developed, would and should be considered a proprietary national resource contributing critically to American defense and economic prosperity," Mayer wrote.

Surana said he takes great pride in being able to tackle such a large project that will aid the armed forces and industry for years to come.

"Personally, it is gratifying from the point of view that when I stumbled upon all of this I thought it was too big for me to handle," he said. "It is very challenging and exciting to provide the U.S. armed forces with a computational tool they can trust."