Facilities
Patrick Caton
The interdisciplinary capstone design class has a dedicated space for the construction of prototypes or modifications of existing projects. This design studio has common construction materials (wood, metals, foam, PVC, etc), shop tools (saws, drill press, sander, etc), hand tools and assorted mechanisms.Jim Cowart
The Engine Research Lab and dyno cells are used to support EM300 - Principles of Propulsion, EM461 - Engines: Principles, Design and Applications, and faculty and midshipmen research. There are a variety of reciprocating engines mounted on water brake and eddy current dynamometers. There is also a wide variety of test equipment to support parametric studies as well as alternative fuel research. Finally there is a small machine shop used by the propulsion lab techs to maintain the engines and fabricate research equipment.
Cody Brownell
The Directed Energy Research Center (DERC) at the Naval Academy educates midshipmen in the physics and application of directed energy technologies, particularly high energy lasers, and facilitates joint midshipmen-faculty research on topics of interest. The laboratory has several IPG fiber lasers, beam characterization tools, scientific cameras, and standard optical benches with hardware for a variety of uses. There is also a satellite facility at Waterfront Readiness / Hendrix Lab for in-situ measurement of optical turbulence parameters across the Severn River. Karen Flack
The heat transfer laboratory is used in support of EM316 and EM317 - Thermo-Fluid Sciences I and II and EM415 - Heat Transfer. This laboratory has benches equipped with heaters, hot and cold water lines with flow meters, fans, radiant sources and data acquisition to study steady state and transient conduction, radiant heating, heat sinks and heat exchangers.
The fluids laboratory is used in support of EM316 - Thermo-Fluids Sciences I and EM324 - Fluid Mechanics. This laboratory contains table top units to study viscosity, momentum and hydrostatic forces. Larger units are used for the study of pipe flow and pumps. A small wind tunnel with a manometer and force balance demonstrates the concepts of lift and drag on objects. The students use a large tow tank facility for a similarity study and have access to larger wind tunnels if needed for independent research or capstone design.
CAPT Brad Baker
These laboratory facilities have a wide array of mechanical testing, microscopy, and sample preparation equipment. The central materials lab contains a tensile tester, Rockwell hardness testers, a drop tower, Charpy impact tester, 4 atmospheric heat treat furnaces, and a fatigue tester, and is equipped with lab benches for additional tabletop experiments. The metallography lab contains equipment for cutting, mounting, grinding and polishing, microhardness testers, and microscopes. A Scanning Electron Microscope adds significant microscopy capability. The corrosion lab supports many courses using a variety of fatigue and slow strain rate testers, salt/spray immersion cabinets, and more.
Marshall Millett
The Nucleonics Lab is a facility that contains a subcritical reactor, various radiation detectors, and ten different student computer workstations that are networked to an array of detectors and laboratory devices. The Nucleonics Lab also has a neutron generator housed in a shielded volume with associated computer systems and laboratory connections. In total the Nucleonics Lab has a wide assortment of major pieces of equipment (e.g. subcritical reactor and neutron generator), radiation detectors (e.g. gas filled detectors, scintillation detectors, and neutron detectors), dosimeters, computer workstations, radiation sources (e.g. photon sources, neutron sources, and alpha sources), and software packages, all of which are available for classroom, laboratory, and research use.Peter Joyce
