Article: Public, private support touted to develop UTCís SimCenter into national technology anchor
Second of two parts
Louie Elliott and Ryan Glasby are still in school, but the UTC doctoral students also are on the job for Radiance Technologies.
The defense contractor recently hired the computational engineering students, with full pay and tuition benefits, to help staff a Chattanooga office that opened in February to be near the SimCenter.
“We wanted to hire these people before they go elsewhere,” said Mike Pearson, Radiance’s director of Tennessee operations.
Mr. Pearson, who grew up in Chattanooga, said by offering both research facilities and skilled graduates, the SimCenter is key to Radiance’s plans to grow in Chattanooga. With its bank of high-speed computers and 19 research professors, the SimCenter is able to conduct simulated tests of physical phenomena and activities through thousands of computerized computations.
The SimCenter helped the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s first Ph.D. student, Brian Lambert, graduate in December 2004. Although the early graduates of the program moved elsewhere, some technology companies see an expanded SimCenter as offering fertile ground for development in Chattanooga.
Applied Hydro Acoustics Research Inc., which develops sonar systems for the U.S. Navy, opened a Chattanooga office in 2005 to be close to the SimCenter. BloomEnergy of Sunnyvale, Calif., is using the SimCenter to test fuel cell components, which local officials hope may someday be made in Chattanooga.
Dr. David Whitfield, the associate dean of UTC’s engineering school and director of the SimCenter, expects other businesses will be eager to use the SimCenter and hire its graduates. Although UTC didn’t even have a Ph.D. program before the SimCenter came to Chattanooga, Dr. Whitfield insists that the unique team approach among faculty and student engineers gives UTC a two- to three-year edge in computational engineering over well-known engineering schools such as MIT and Stanford.
In its new assessment of the nation’s best places for business and careers, Forbes magazine touts the SimCenter among Chattanooga’s key assets for attracting more high-tech jobs.
“Chattanooga’s rebirth rests on some surprising successes, such as in technology,” Forbes reports in an article on Chattanooga titled “Back on Track.”
Already, the SimCenter, recently elevated to the National Center for Computational Engineering, is attracting student and faculty interest.
Mr. Glasby, who came to UTC after earning a master’s degree in aerospace engineering at Ohio State University, said he enjoys being able to do real-life research with a variety of professors at UTC.
“In my master’s program, I worked with far fewer professors,” he said.
Lei Ji, a Chinese native who earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Nebraska, researched numerous universities before deciding to come to UTC two years ago because of the SimCenter’s cutting-edge hardware and team research approach.
“I definitely think I made the right choice to come here,” he said.
Like most graduate programs, the SimCenter has a faculty member for each student in the program. But students at UTC usually work with different faculty with various backgrounds on real-life problems.
“We have a very collegial working relationship here among different professors and students solving really practical problems,” said Dr. Harry McDonald, the chair of excellence professor in computational engineering at UTC. “We see already that our students are very much in demand.”
real life solutions
The SimCenter has the equivalent of 1,300 gigabits of memory from its own bank of computers and is linked to one of the biggest computers in the world at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The center’s faculty and students have conducted computer simulations on everything from the design of rocket engines to how the wind might disperse a toxic chemical.
More than 80 percent of the SimCenter’s funding now comes from contracts for work done by the faculty and students, on everything from blood flow to underwater currents of submarines.
Closer to home, the SimCenter has tested drag resistance for 18-wheel semi-trailers and tires for U.S. Xpress and helped design and test nano filters for eSpin Technologies.
“We’ll buy close to $40 million worth of fuel in one month,” U.S. Xpress Chairman and CEO Max Fuller told SimCenter officials last year. “According to the calculations that the SimCenter has come up with, we can improve fuel economy up to 8 percent. That’s tremendous.”
For eSpin, SimCenter students and faculty modeled microscopic filter designs with thousands of air- and liquid-flow variables. The tests of eSpin designs didn’t cost the company any of its own money because of university, federal and state aid for technology assistance for small businesses.
growing mission
Dr. McDonald came to UTC after serving as center director for the 4,500-employee NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley for seven years.
“I expected a nice, quiet life, working with the students and living very quietly,” he said. “After running the center in Silicon Valley, I really wasn’t looking for a lot more excitement. But it sort of caught up with me. It’s hard to say ‘no’ to an opportunity like this. The nation, the state, the community and our students all desire this.”
The SimCenter, Dr. McDonald believes, is the type of training facility America needs to keep the United States competitive with India, China and other Third World countries that are training hundreds of thousands of top-quality engineers.
“Engineers are the key to translating ideas into reality,” he said.
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