Dynamics Summer School

Purpose: The purpose of this summer school is to focus a select group of prospective upper level undergraduate students and first year graduate students (limited to US citizens) on the broad field of engineering dynamics. Engineering dynamics encompasses technologies such as flight dynamics, vibration isolation for precision manufacturing, earthquake engineering, blast loading, signal processing, experimental modal analysis, etc. We hope that the students will be motivated to pursue this area of research during their graduate studies. We are proposing this summer school concept because over the last 20 years there has seen a 20% decline in the number of engineering degrees granted while university degrees in general have increased approximately 20%. The competition for talented individuals with the background necessary to replace attrition in this area of technology necessitate a proactive approach of identifying, motivating, and educating student that are embarking on their graduate school career. We believe that the proposed program will not only benefit the students through their educational experience, but will hopefully make them aware of career possibilities in defense-related industries after they have completed their graduate studies. In this regard, defense technology companies will directly benefit from this educational program as it can serve to proactively recruit some of the best young engineering talent in the US for careers in defense programs.

The summer school will have two focus areas. First, the multi-disciplinary nature of research in engineering dynamics will be emphasized throughout the summer school. To this end, the students will be assigned to multi-disciplinary teams where a coupled analytical/experimental approach to dynamics problems will be emphasized. Second, we will strive to develop the students' written and oral communications skills. To develop these skills, the students will be required to give numerous oral presentations of their work as it progresses through out the summer culminating in a paper written for a technical conference.

Duration and Location: The summer school will last nine weeks (Mid-June - Second week in August). The summer school will be held at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Students: The program will be designed for upper division (Junior or Senior) undergraduate students or first year graduate students. Students will be paid the same salaries as regular LANL undergraduate and graduate research assistant. Attempts will be made to identify high quality students from diverse backgrounds. Here diversity will include academic diversity, human diversity and geographical diversity. Acceptance into the program will be based on academic record, and letters of recommendation. Every attempt will be made to identify students from universities that emphasize undergraduate education as well as research institutes. The students will be limited to US citizens. A variety of academic disciplines will be sought including aerospace engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, mathematics/statistics.

Projects: The students will be placed into three-person teams and will be assigned a research activity that can be completed in an intense nine-week time frame. Attempts will be made to develop multi-disciplinary teams. As an example a civil engineer, mechanical engineer and statistician may be teamed together. The research activities will have an analytical and experimental component to them. The goal will be to produce results and document their activities in a manner suitable for reporting at technical conferences.

Mentors: In addition to the program coordinators, each research group will have a mentor (either a LANL technical staff member or visiting faculty member) assigned for the duration of the summer school. The mentors will spend 25% of their work time each week with the students during the 8-week summer school.

Mentors and visiting faculty members will also prepare week-long tutorials (five 1 hr lectures) on a variety of subjects. Possible topics will include:

Tutorials:
1. Rigid-body dynamics
2. Vibrations
3. Wave propagation
4. Vibration measurements and data acquisition
5. Signal processing
6. Experimental modal analysis
7. Computational structural dynamics
8. Random Vibrations
9. Nonlinear structural dynamics
10. Acoustics
11. Controls

Visiting Lecturers: Each week we will bring in a prominent guest lecturer in the field of engineering dynamics to give a talk to the students about "cutting edge research" in this field. The lecturer will be asked to spend several days with the students to discuss their projects, provide suggestions and provide additional motivation.

Field Trips: In addition to guest lectures, we will develop field trips for the students.