The Aerodynamics, Fluids, and Thermal Engineering research groups and laboratories investigate a wide variety of research topics in the field of Fluid Mechanics.
Current research projects include boundary layer control, development of computational algorithms for the design and analysis of aerospace vehicles, the study of differential diffusion in a turbulent jet, unsteady aerodynamic studies on wings and airfoils in subsonic and supersonic flows with applications to aero-elastic oscillations control, studies on the next-generation hypersonic air-breathing engines, computational and numerical investigations of compact heat exchangers, and the study of wing tip vortices from fixed and cyclically pitched wings.
Facilities include the J. Armand Bombardier 3ft x 4ft Low-Turbulence Subsonic Wind Tunnel at the Aerodynamics Lab, which is being primarily used for the investigation of aircraft wingtip vortices as well as rotorcraft blade-vortex interaction. The lab employs laser/optics flow measurement equipment and multiple hot-film sensor array as well as PIV flow measurement equipment. A state-of-the-art heat transfer lab investigates fluid flow and heat transfer in engineering systems for energy conversion, exchange, and storage. Researchers have access to the McGill High Performance Computing (HPC) centre, which operates one of the most advanced computing and data management facilities in Canada and the world. McGill HPC is equipped with 21000 processing cores with both graphical processing units and Intel Phi accelerators and provides extensive data storage, cloud-computing services, and advanced technical support and HPC consulting to McGill researchers.
Research funding is primarily contributed by the federal and provincial governments through NSERC, CFI and FQRNT as well as by industrial partners, such as Bombardier, Pratt & Whitney, Bell Helicopter and a large number of private companies.