Aeronautics & Astronautics
Mitsuru Kurosaka

Professor

kurosaka@aa.washington.edu
Office: 316B Guggenheim
Phone: (206) 685-2619

University of Washington
BOX 352400
Seattle, WA 98195-2400

 
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Background

Professor Kurosaka received his B.S. and M.S. from the University of Tokyo and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. After graduation from Cal Tech in 1968, he worked in industry, first at AiResearch Manufacturing Company and then at General Electric Research and Development Center. In 1977, he returned to academia and joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee Space Institute where he became a professor in 1979. Under the support of the Air Force and M.I.T., he spent a year at M.I.T. as a visiting professor in 1984-85. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1987. He is Fellow of ASME and the first recipient of the Professor of the Year Award (1993) of the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics.

Research Activities

His interests are thermo-fluid problems related to airbreathing propulsion and vortex dynamics. His early credits in the technical-area-first include the diagnosis/analysis of multiple pure tone noise and supersonic flutter of high speed turbofan blades. He then succeeded in pinning down the mechanism of the Ranque-Hilsch effect, the results of which were published by the American Physical Society in Physics News in 1983. As a result, he received the AIAA General H.H. (Hap) Arnold Award. Next he and co-workers explained the mechanism of Eckert-Weise effect. In the area of vortex-induced enhancement of turbine cooling, he and his students made contributions in the areas of impingement- and film cooling and along the way uncovered energy separation in large-scale structures and the presence of anti-kidney vortices in cross flow jets.His current interest is vortex breakdowns, for which he and his students are developing self-induction theory and conducting experiments.

Selected Publications
  1. "Azimuthal vorticity gradient in the formative stages of vortex breakdown"( with C.B. Cain, S.Srigrarom, J.D. Wimer, D. Dabiri, W.F. Johnson, J.C. Hatcher, B.R. Thompson, M. Kikuchi, K.Hirano, T. Yuge and T. Honda) Journal of Fluid Mechanics (2006), vol.569, pp.1-28.
  2. Interchangeability of Vortex Breakdown Types' (with M.Kukuchi, K. Hirano, T. Yuge, and H. Inoue ), Experiments in Fluids, vol.34, pp.77-86, (2003)
  3. "Shaping of Delta Wing Planform to Suppress Vortex Breakdown" (with S. Srigrarom), AIAA Journal., vol.38, No.1, pp.183-186, (2000).
  4. "Surface Shaping to Suppress Vortex Breakdown on Delta Wings" (with S. Srigrarom), AIAA Journal., vol.38, No.1, pp.186-187, (2000).
  5. "Kidney and anti-kidney vortices in crossflow jets" (with B.A. Haven), Journal of Fluid Mechanics, vol.352, pp.27-64, 1997.
  6. "Improved Jet Coverage Through Vortex Cancellation"(with B.A. Haven), AIAA Journal, vol. 34, no. 11, pp.2443-2444, 1997.
  7. "Supersonic cooling by shock-vortex interaction" (with M.D. Fox), Journal of Fluid Mechanics, vol.308, pp.363-379, 1996.
  8. "Hairpin Vortex-Induced Cross Flow Transport" (with J.P. Hagen), Physics of Fluids, Vol. 5, No. 12, pp. 3167-3173, 1993.
  9. "The Influence of Vortical Structures on the Thermal Fields of Jets" (with M.D. Fox, L. Hedges and K. Hirano), Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Vol. 255, No. 10, pp. 447-472, 1993; Journal of Fluid Mechanics, pp. 261(25 February), 1994.
  10. "Energy Separation in a Vortex Street" (with J.B. Gertz, J.E. Graham, J.R. Goodman, P. Sundaram, W.C. Riner, H. Kuroda and W.L. Hankey), Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Vol. 178, pp. 1-29, 1987.
  11. "Acoustic Streaming in Swirling Flow and the Ranque-Hilsch Effect," Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 124, pp. 139-72, 1982.