To the viewer:

This website contains the lectures from my Aeroelasticity course in the Spring of 2020. This was an unusual spring semester in that, as you well know, it was interrupted by COVID-19 and the semester was concluded on Zoom. However even before that the lectures were recorded as they were transmitted to Stockholm for the benefit of our European partners in the THRUST program. THRUST is a two year master’s degree program with the students spending the first year in Stockholm at KTH and the second year at KTH or the University of Liege in Belgium or Duke University in the United States.

At the end of the semester each of my then PhD students, Dani Levin, Kevin McHugh, Maxim Freydin, Michael Lee and also my faculty colleague, Jeff Thomas,  presented lectures on their current research interests. I know you will enjoy their presentations as I did on the (1) the use of the ZAERO computer code for aeroelastic analysis, (2) hypersonic fluid structure interaction, (3) the construction of Reduced Order Models for the Navier-Stokes equations and (4) the use of harmonic balance methods for nonlinear aeroelastic analysis. My own lectures largely covered the first four chapters of the book, “A Modern Course in Aeroelasticity”, using the fifth edition.  A sixth edition will appear in 2021, but the first fourteen chapters of the latest edition will be largely unchanged except for the correction of most, if not all, of the typos that appear in the fifth edition. The first homework assignment for the aeroelasticity course last spring was to find the typos in Chapter 2! Subsequent homework covered Chapters 3 and 4 and a summer reading course with one of the PhD students in the course, Ricky Hollenback, led to typos in the later Chapters being identified and corrected.

The experimental videos that are included here will be discussed more extensively in Chapter 15, a new chapter of the sixth edition, and represent about 20 years of aeroelasticity experiments conducted on a range of nonlinear aeroelastic models at Duke University.  Much of this work was led by Dr. Deman Tang. The attachment is a journal article on which Chapter 15 will be based. Also, in the new edition of the book a chapter on hypersonic aeroelasticity (fluid structural thermal dynamics interaction), Chapter 16,  will be included with contributions from Kevin McHugh and Maxim Freydin.

The Duke University Aeroelasticity Team hopes that you will enjoy all of this material. Special acknowledgement and appreciation is extended to Dr. Deman Tang and Dr. Dani Levin for their contributions to the new edition to the book and to this website respectively.

Enjoy!
Earl Dowell