Faculty Portfolio
IN developing the "new" Thayer School, Dean Tribus has had notable success in assembling a strong and versatile faculty, made up of men capable of contributing to both the professional and research tracks of the School's dual program. In this Faculty Portfolio we present a representative group of Thayer School professors whose teaching is buttressed by research interests and projects in which they are actively engaged.
GRAHAM B. WALLIS, Associate Professor of Engineering Sciences, is a native of England and the holder of master's and doctoral degrees from Cambridge University. He came to Dartmouth in 1962. Professor Wallis has been active for several years in the field of two-phase flow, heat and mass transfer. In addition to the specific topics of boiling and condensation his research has been devoted to the flow properties of mixtures of gases and liquids, liquids and solids, and gases and solids. At present he is mostly concerned with the logical organization of knowledge from all branches of this field under a unified format. For the past two years he has conducted summer courses at Dartmouth which were attended by professors from other institutions, engineers, and research scientists from industry and government laboratories. This summer his course will be given at Stanford University and in Glasgow, Scotland.
ALVIN O. CONVERSE, Associate Professor of Engineering, is a Lehigh graduate (1954) and the holder of a doctoral degree in chemical engineering. His teaching specialties include chemical reaction engineering, combustion and heat transfer, and problems in optimization. His current research is devoted to both optimization and combustion. In the former, the advent of the digital computer has made it possible for the engineer to evaluate a large number of possible design variations and to select the best one; Professor Converse is primarily interested in applying these new computational techniques to the design of chemical reactors. The object of his combustion research is to develop techniques that could be used in the laboratory to measure the ability of solid propellants to generate undesirable pressure oscillations when burned in a rocket motor. Following preliminary experiments at the Thayer School, development work is being carried out at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
PAUL T. SHANNON, Associate Professor of Engineering, received his doctorate in chemical engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology and taught at Purdue before joining the Thayer faculty in 1962. His research interests have been in thermodynamics and information theory. More recently he has developed PACER, a program for computer simulation and design of chemical plants, which has been incorporated into courses in some twenty other institutions. PACER workshops have been held in a great many other schools. Last fall Professor Shannon became a Consultive Associate Professor of McMaster University in Canada, where he works with the engineering staff in developing courses and research projects in the area of computer applications in process simulation and design. He also has done special work at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory.
JACOB P. FRANKEL, Professor of Engineering Sciences, came to Dartmouth last year from UCLA, where he took his Ph.D. and had taught since 1957. He teaches an undergraduate course in solid mechanics, and at the graduate level he specializes in industrial development policies, methods, and field studies. Professor Frankel has been active in rural industrialization in Latin America, a program in which he and graduate students assist engineers, economists, and business people to set up small industries using local capital and raw materials for locally needed products. These activities involve engineering, micro-economics, business administration, and agronomy - what the Thayer School calls technological entrepreneurship.
Professor Frankel and co-workers have been associated with projects in Brazil, Chile, and Central America, and graduate students at Thayer are now interested in further work in Chile, Nigeria, and Egypt. Local industries which Professor Frankel has helped establish over a period of years include corn-processing, shoes, ceramics, radios and electric motors, chemicals, meat-processing, fine cotton paper, cement, and a ship-building and repair yard.
Professor McCormack's present research is in the field of fluid dynamics. The fluids laboratory, which he established at Thayer School, is now engaged on three problems: (1) the effect of mechanical vibration on the mixing characteristics of gas jets; (2) the effect of mechanical vibration on a two-phase jet consisting of ultrasonically produced liquid particles entrained in a gas jet; and (3) unsteady boundary layer phenomena produced by fluids flowing over concave surfaces, and the effect on heat transfer through the layer. The first two are sponsored in part by the U. S. Air Force and the National Science Foundation.
Earlier work on liquid jets was praised in ArmedForces (November 1966): "McCormack's results provided a solution to a problem of combustion instability which had arisen during tests of the NASA engine. They applied his results successfully and eliminated the instability."
PERCIVAL D. MCCORMACK, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Engineering, came to Dartmouth in 1965 from Dublin University, where he was lecturer in electronic and control engineering and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. His graduate courses at Thayer deal with servomechanisms, atomic theory of gas dynamics, and control theory.
JOSEPH J. ERMENC, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, inaugurated in 1964 a new undergraduate course in the Department of Engineering Sciences dealing with the development of technology in past and modern societies. At the same time there was founded the Industrial Development Archive, a repository for interviews conducted by Professor Ermenc with inventors of the great technological achievements of this century. A National Science Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1962-63 enabled him to go abroad for his study of the evolution of technology. He was an honorary member of the faculty of the University College in London, and was associated with the Science Museum in London. Based on his work in England, he is preparing a series of case histories in leading technologies.
Professor Ermenc, who is a graduate of Wisconsin and did his graduate work at Michigan, has taught at Dartmouth since 1942. His graduate courses at Thayer School deal with thermal environmental engineering and power plants.
GEORGE A. COLLIGAN, Professor of Engineering Sciences, is a specialist in metallurgy, in which he did research for General Electric and then the United Aircraft Corporation before joining the Thayer faculty in 1962. That fall, with support from the Office of Naval Research, he began a program of fundamental research in the solidification of metals and alloys. More recently, under the sponsorship of the Army Materials Research Agency, he has turned to the study of the reactions, both chemical and physical, that take place when liquid metals and alloys come in contact with ceramic materials used as. refractory melting containers and bricks. Professor Colligan's graduate courses deal with metallurgy, X-ray diffraction, and physical ceramics. He directs materials research projects by both Thayer School students and senior honors men in the engineering sciences major.
Professor Colligan, a 1950 graduate of R.P.I., took his Ph.D. degree at Michigan. He is editorial board chairman of the Cast MetalsResearch Journal.
GEORGE A. TAYLOR, Professor of Engineering and Management, began teaching a Methods Improvement Course in 1951. His students have won numerous national prizes for practical applications they have developed from improvement techniques taught in the course. The prime objective of the course is to teach students to think creatively in developing cost-conscious techniques for industrial and business operations. Professor Taylor has conducted off-campus methods workshops for manufacturing executives, and from these grew his program, "Executive Decision Making," for all top-level functions. First given at Lake Placid, N. Y., the latter program was subsequently brought to Dartmouth where it is now offered each summer. Professor Taylor is the author of the book Economic Decision Making (1964) and is currently working on Sycrenetics, The ImportantElement in Decision Making.
Professor Taylor came to Dartmouth in 1949 after B.S. and M.S. degrees in engineering from New York University and employment with General Electric and Ingersoll-Rand. He is adviser to the joint Thayer- Tuck program for students preparing for management responsibilities in engineering-oriented industries.
PETER W. RUNSTADLER JR., who came to Dartmouth in 1965 as Assistant Professor of Engineering, is conducting research in high-pressure arc plasma flows and is being supported in his work with funds from the National Science Foundation and the U. S. Air Force. Plasma (extremely high temperature) gas flows are used, for example, as energy sources for high-temperature wind tunnels for space research and as possible rocket propulsion for deep space probes. Research at Thayer has yielded much information on the fundamental physical process controlling the operation of the critically important anodes in high-pressure arc flows. Professor Runstadler has plans for study also of the turbulent boundary layer and the fundamental fluid mechanics of turbo-machinery.
