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Labs and Facilities

The Aerospace Engineering Department is located in the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Building, a 100,000 square-foot complex that includes classrooms, teaching laboratories and research labs as well as faculty and staff offices. The department also partially occupies four other research buildings; the wind tunnel building (20,000 Sq ft), high-vacuum pumping station (4000 sq ft), power house (1000 sq ft) and the PEPL lab (5000 sq ft). Research facilities in the building(s) include:

A collection of wind tunnels that can test from micro air vehicles to models generating hundreds of pounds of lift and from very low-speed flight to above Mach 4 (Supersonic tunnels are in the wind tunnel building)
A laboratory for plasmadynamics and electric propulsion, where full-scale tests can be run at millionths of a Torr (PEPL lab on Green Road)
A composites laboratory with facility for mechanical testing of materials, vacuum and heating chambers for testing in controlled environments, high speed imaging of cracks and instrumentation for non-destructive evaluation.
A laboratory for autonomous aerospace systems
Explosion resistant high bay research labs
Aero Learning Center for students
A laboratory for the design, development and deployment of small satellites, the Michigan Exploration Laboratory (MXL)

To schedule a tour of our facility, see our visiting advice.

Below is a list of laboratories, facilities, and centers associated with each discipline. As research centers are often highly interdisciplinary, they are listed under each applicable area.

Gas Dynamics
Dynamics and Controls
Space Systems
Structures and Materials

Gas Dynamics

Faculty Labs

Shared Facilities

Wind Tunnels

Research Centers

Center for Space Environment Modeling (CSEM)
Constellation University Institutes Project (CUIP)
François-Xavier Bagnoud Flight Vehicle Institute (FVI)
Michigan/Air Force Center of Excellence in Electric Propulsion (MACEEP)
Michigan/AFRL/Boeing Collaborative Center in Aeronautical Sciences (MAB-CCAS)
Air Force Center of Excellence on Rocket Combustor Dynamics
Directed by Prof. Duraisamy in collaboration with MIT, Purdue and NYU, the goal of the center is to advance the state-of-the-art in Reduced Order Models (ROMs) and enable efficient prediction of transient events leading to the onset of instabilities in liquid fueled rocket combustion systems. The key outcomes are the following:

ROMs of variable/adaptive fidelity derived from an organized hierarchy of higher fidelity simulations.
Integration of ROMs into a multi-fidelity model that can predict the stability characteristics of a full-scale LRE containing multiple injector elements.
Given a nominal engine configuration, end use is a methodology that designers can use to: a) Efficiently characterize combustion dynamics in O(days) on small cluster; b) Explore effect of parametric changes on QoIs
Innovations to the science of reduced modeling of complex systems
Engagement with AFRL researchers and exchange of knowledge, tools and data.