Dr. Edward C.Smith
Professor of Aerospace Engineering
231D Hammond Building
Department of Aerospace Engineering
University Park, PA 16802
Phone: 814-863-0966 / Fax: 814-865-7092
E-mail: ecs5@psu.edu
Web page: www.engr.psu.edu/vlrcoe
Working with helicopters gives Ed Smith a chance to use pretty much everything he learned as an undergraduate engineering major at Penn State. As he puts it, none of the homework was wasted. “With spacecraft and airplanes, the work is more compartmentalized,” he explained. “But with helicopters, the engineering problems are all mixed up, and I like that.”
One reason for the variety of problems is that helicopters are the most complicated machines ever devised by man, Smith said. Another is that, compared to fixed-wing aircraft, the technology is still immature. Helicopters have only been in mass production since 1942.
Smith became interested in several facets of helicopter technology – vibration control, structures, and reparable blades -- at the University of Maryland where he earned his doctorate in 1991. He candidly admits that during his student days he wanted an industry rather than an academic career, wanted to be a builder rather than a researcher and teacher. Then the Berlin Wall fell and so did defense outlays; manufacturers were firing rather than hiring.
Unique among university aerospace programs, Penn State attracted Smith. It had a “helicopter heritage,” he said, the result of Lord Corporation and Boeing being nearby as well as the pioneering work of Professor Barnes McCormick who at the time was moving to emeritus status. As a member of the Penn State faculty, Smith has researched all aspects of helicopter dynamics, including tailored composite rotor blades, active vibration control, rotor lag damping and aeromechanical stability, shipboard helicopter operations, driveline dynamics, and anti-icing systems.
Besides his appointment as professor of aerospace engineering, Smith is director of the multidisciplinary U.S. Army Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence, which is housed at Penn State. Smith's current research and teaching interests include all aspects of helicopter dynamics, including tailored composite rotor blades, active vibration control, rotor lag damping and aeromechanical stability, shipboard helicopter operations, and driveline dynamics.
After 18 years on the Penn State faculty, Smith said he appreciates how an academic career has afforded him a broad view of both technology and industry.
The career also has enabled him to mentor students and young colleagues. He particularly enjoys lining up a job for someone, a calling he claims is in his blood: His dad was a vocational educational administrator for the New York City schools, and his mom was vice president of an employment agency.
Smith grew up in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., where both his parents duly admired the model airplanes he and his brother built at a card table in the basement of their row house. A few of those models have survived and today are among dozens lining the shelves of Smith’s office in the Hammond building on Penn State’s University Park campus.
“I didn’t want engineering students to come into my office and see me surrounded by books,” he said. “For engineers, it’s all about the toys. In other fields – law, medicine – you do your job and buy your toys on the side. For engineers, the job is the toys.”
Besides model airplanes, Smith grew up liking baseball, football and roller hockey. The latter interest resurfaced in 2001 when Smith’s then five-year-old son began playing ice hockey. It was a stressful time in Smith’s life, and he thought hockey might be a diversion. Urged on by colleague Dennis McLaughlin, he became and remains a defenseman on a Nittany Hockey League team, the Vikings, that plays five or six times a month.
In fact, Smith claims that when recruiting graduate students and new faculty for the department, he is always on the lookout for big Canadians.
At roughly the same time ice hockey imposed itself on Smith’s personal life, ice was doing the same on his professional life -- specifically the engineering problem of icing on rotor blades. “We had a sponsor who wanted us to address the effects of adverse weather conditions,” Smith recalled. “I said, ‘What does that mean?’ and the sponsor said, ‘Ice.’”
A big problem for fixed-wing airplanes, ice is even worse for helicopters. For one thing, helicopters fly low and slow, lingering at the cloudy altitude where ice forms rather than surmounting it as a jet does. For another, rotor blades don’t slough ice behind them as the wings on airplanes do. Instead, once released, the ice shoots every which way – creating what Smith calls “ballistic objects” that threaten delicate mechanisms and anything else nearby. Often, in fact, perils posed by ice prevent helicopters’ flying the very MEDEVAC and search missions for which the Coast Guard and other agencies keep them. Currently, the main ice-fighter in the arsenal is a heater blanket, but that poses problems of its own – consuming a lot of energy and requiring careful monitoring lest it overheat and melt more than just the ice.
Smith had been interested in helicopter dynamics, the vibrations that make the ride bumpy for people and electronics, and that interest led him to wonder whether ultrasonic vibrations might be used to combat ice. The answer, as seven years of research and invention has shown, is yes, and there’s a “neat gadget” – actually an anti-icing ultra-sonic actuator -- in the basement of Penn State’s Hammond building that has worked in lab tests and is still in development.
You can think of the actuator as a joy buzzer constructed from piezoelectric materials that introduces high-frequency dynamics – or vibration -- at a rate of 30, 50 or 200 kilohertz within either the blade or fuselage. While the vibration isn’t perceptible to a person, it’s enough to jolt the ice free. Commercial manufacture of such an anti-icing solution is probably many years away. Piezoelectric materials have the density of lead, which makes them a tough addition to a machine that is supposed to fly, and installing them in a way that retains the craft’s center of gravity is problematic. However, the U.S. Army, Boeing and other groups have expressed interest and provided funding for further exploration of the technology.
For society, helicopters’ mobility makes them uniquely and increasingly useful for transportation, construction, firefighting, search-and-rescues and observation. For engineers, helicopters pose multiple and mixed-up engineering problems that promise to provide interesting challenges for years to come. For Ed Smith and his students, helicopters are all that and more: They are very, very cool toys.
Active in AIAA and the American Helicopter Society (AHS) Smith has served on the AIAA structural dynamics technical committee, and chaired both the AHS dynamics technical and education committees. In 2009, he was made a fellow of the AHS.
Among Smith’s other awards are the AHS Director's Award for contributions to vertical flight technology by a member under the age of 30, and three AHS Membership Sponsor Awards. In 2002, Smith was awarded the Lawrence Sperry Award from the AIAA, which cited his leadership of the Rotorcraft Center, research in composite tailored rotor blades, and dedication to aerospace engineering education. Also in 2002, he was awarded the Penn State Engineering Society Outstanding Research Award.