• Lakshmi N. Sankar
  • Regents Professor
  • Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs

Contact Information

Office: Guggenheim 360
Phone: 404.894.3014
Fax: 404.894.2760

Education

  • B.Tech.,  Aeronautical Engineering, 1973, Indian Institute of Technology
  • M.S.,  Aerospace Engineering, 1975, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Ph.D,  Aerospace Engineering, 1977, Georgia Institute of Technology

Biography

Dr. Sankar joined Georgia Tech as a Senior Research Engineer in 1982 after four years of experience at Lockheed Georgia Company.  He attained the ranks of Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering in 1985, and Professor of Aerospace Engineering in 1991.  His fields of interest include Computational Fluid Dynamics, Unsteady Aerodynamics, rotorcraft aerodynamics, aeroelasticity and aerodynamic design.  He has published over 300 refereed and conference papers, and given numerous invited lectures and short courses on computational fluid dynamics.  He has developed a number of computer codes for the unsteady subsonic and transonic viscous flow analyses of aircraft, rotorcraft and propeller configurations, and was the author of the USIPWING code. These codes are in wide use within the US helicopter industry, NASA Research Centers and Universities. He has experience in writing multiblock flow solvers, and applying them to studies such as flow through counterrotating propellers, two- and three-dimensional high lift systems and multi-bladed helicopter rotors. He also has experience in using public domain multiblock solvers. He recently worked on enhancements to the U. S. Army/NASA OVERFLOW 2.0 analysis.

Research

Computational fluid dynamics, with applications in the following areas:
  • Physics based modeling of axial and centrifugal compressor aerodynamics, and the control of compressor stall and surge phenomena
  • Physics based modeling of horizontal axis wind turbines for the prediction of wind turbine performance (power production as a function of wind speed and yaw) and associated aeroelastic phenomena
  • Multi-scale modeling of active and passive flow control devices for lift enhancement (circulation control, Gurney flaps, morphing airfoil and wing structures), and for drag reduction (synthetic jets, Coanda jets)
  • Multidisciplinary approaches combining structural, aeroelastic and aerodynamic analyses
    for modeling and designing helicopters

Selected Publications

  •  Xu, G. and Sankar, L. N., “Application of a Viscous Flow methodology to NREL Phase VI Wind Turbine,” Journal of Wind Energy, 2002.
  •  Yang, Z., Sankar, L. N., Smith, M. J., and Sankar, O., “Recent Improvements to a Hybrid Method for Rotors in Forward Flight,” Journal of Aircraft, Vol. 39, No. 5, pp. 804-812, September-October 2002.
  • Sahin M., Sankar L., Chandrasekhara M.S. and Tung C., "Dynamic Stall Alleviation using a Deformable Leading Edge Concept - A numerical Study", AIAA Journal of Aircraft, 40 (1), 2003. Hariharan, N., and Sankar, L. N., "Unsteady Overset Simulation of Rotor-Airframe Interaction," Journal of Aircraft, Vol. 40, No.4, July-Aug 2003, pp 662-675.
  • Hariharan, N., and Sankar, L. N., "High-Order Essentially Non-oscillatory Schemes for Rotary-Wing Wake Computations," Journal of Aircraft, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp 258-267, March-April 2004.
  • Tongchitpakdee, C, Benjanirat, S., Sankar, L., “Numerical Simulation of the Aerodynamics of Horizontal Axial Wind Turbines Under Yawed Flow Conditions,” J. of Solar Energy, 2005.