Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Boeing Dreamliner Landing Gear Braces Tested at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering


Jacobs School structural engineering professor Hyonny Kim led testing of the first-ever composite landing gear braces, which were used for the new Boeing 787 aircraft, which took off for the first time today. (New York Times story here.)


Kim is an associate professor in structural engineering at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, and he led a team of researchers that performed six months of rigorous Federal Aviation Administration tests on the composite landing gear braces.


“This was a very important test,” Kim said. “The quality standards of the testing, and keeping track of the data and documentation (for FAA certification) is extremely high. For us, we had to improve our methods and processes to get to be able to perform at the FAA certification level and we did. We have proven that we can do this level of testing. We have the facility and equipment and capability to do it. What we hope with this project is to demonstrate to the aerospace industry that UC San Diego is capable of and can perform aerospace certification testing for future projects.”


French Aerospace company Messier-Dowty tapped into the expertise of structural engineering professor Hyonny Kim this year to test the strength and durability of the first-ever composite landing gear braces for the commercial aircraft industry.




Energy Efficient Computing on Multiple Scales



"Energy is one of the key issues to be solved in order for systems to work more efficiently," said UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering professor Tajana Simunic Rosing, who is leading MuSyC's Large-Scale Systems effort. "At a very small scale such as a brain-machine interface, without energy you cannot do anything at all. At a very large scale such as a data center, if you are not efficient about how you deal with energy, you go bankrupt."

This quote is from a Calit2 press release announcing Jacobs School computer science professor Tajana Simunic Rosing as one of the leaders of a new research center charged with finding ways to improve the design of computing systems ranging from large data centers to tiny brain sensors. In its first three years, the Multi-Scale Systems Center (MuSyC) will focus on tackling a critical issue affecting multiple scales: energy efficiency.

Doug Ramsey from Calit2 wrote the story. Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering Web site, or on the Calit2 Web site.
Caption for above photo: MuSyC investigators at UCSD, pictured in front of Calit2's GreenLight Instrument modular data center, include (l-r) Rajesh Gupta, Tajana Simunic Rosing and Amin Vadhat. (Not pictured: SDSC's Allan Snavely)
I briefly covered this announcement in a story about Tajana Simunic Rosing's work on energy-efficient data centers in the latest Jacobs School alumni magazine, Pulse.