Sheryl Grace, PhD Associate Professor (ME)
Education PhD, University of Notre DamePrimary Appointment Department of Mechanical Engineering
In the News
March 14, 2023
Combining expertise in mechanical engineering, fluid mechanics, and urban hydrology, BU researchers with NASA funding will lead a multimillion-dollar, multi-institution project to help develop quieter vertical lift air vehicles [ More ]
Publications
Research Areas Aerodynamics * Fluid dynamics * Acoustics, Professor Grace’s interests lie in the fields of unsteady aerodynamics and aeroacoustics. She focuses on creating analytical and computational models of the mechanics which create sound and vibration. She is most interested in applications in which the vibration and sound result from the interactions of unsteady flows past solid bodies, such as for aircraft external structures and marine and aircraft propulsion systems. Her analyses are intended to be used as predictive tools in the design of next generation systems, and they offer a less expensive mode of prediction as compared to experiment.
Three examples of physical applications her research group has considered in the past are the noise generated by high-lift wing systems, the effect of vane clocking in turbines, and the vibration and sound generated when flow passes over wall apertures and cavities. The first is of great interest to commercial airline design, the second impacts blade fatigue in aircraft engines, and the third has a wide variety of applications ranging from the design of high speed trains to new configurations for better cooling in computer chips.
Recently, Professor Grace’s group has also done research related to gerbil hearing. In particular, a computational acoustic scattering model of the gerbil ear was created to analyze the head-related transfer function which describes how a given source of sound interacts with the gerbil ear when the gerbil is in a given environment.
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