Director:  CAPT Joseph McGettigan, USN

Deputy Director:  CDR Frank Weber, USN

Email Division Secretary:  Division Secretary

Facilities

The Division is supported by an array of sophisticated laboratory facilities, with state of the art equipment not available in many undergraduate or even graduate academic institutions.  Highlights of the facilities include;

• A complete aerodynamics laboratory, including a supersonic wind tunnel capable of Mach 4.2, a full-size helicopter rotor test cell, and a propulsion cell supporting turbine, reciprocating and rocket engines.

• A hydrodynamics laboratory including a 380 foot towing tank, several smaller towing tanks, and a circulating water channel to test propeller and rudder design.

• Various state of the art Computer Aided Design (CAD) laboratories with individual high-performance workstations.

• A satellite ground station capable of communicating with orbiting spacecraft, including the Space Shuttle and the Russian Mir space station.

• An advanced materials laboratory with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) capable of magnifying objects up to 300,000X, with state of the art X-ray microanalysis capabilities.

• Specialized electrical engineering laboratories supporting studies in signal processing, fiber optics, and communications.

The primary purpose of the laboratories is to support the education of midshipmen.  A secondary use of the laboratory facilities is to support ongoing faculty research.  This research enables the faculty to stay current in their fields, and often provides an opportunity for some of the more advanced students to assist faculty members (analogous to graduate assistants in civilian universities).