The Aerospace Engineering Department is located in the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Building, a highly modern 90,000 square-foot complex that includes classrooms and teaching laboratories, and faculty and staff offices. Engineering knowledge is gained in part through experience with engineering problems and the experimental approach to their solution. Students benefit from the outstanding facilities available in the Department and from close contact with faculty who are involved in research at the leading edge of all areas of aerospace engineering. Undergraduate students who wish to do so are encouraged to participate in research with our faculty as part of their education.

Research facilities range from subsonic and supersonic wind tunnels, to a composites laboratory, to one of the largest space vacuum chambers at any university. Equipment ranges from CAD/CAE/CAM workstations to a wide array of lasers and computers for state-of-the-art data acquisition, digital imaging, and image processing. The Department's extensive experimental and computer facilities are further augmented by the College's parallel processing and scientific visualization facilities.

The FXB Building contains four blast-resistant hardened laboratories that are used for potentially hazardous experiments as part of the Department's research in high-energy propellant combustion, relevant to advanced propulsion systems; detonation-wave phenomena, relevant to hypersonic propulsion systems; and both explosion and detonation-wave phenomena, relevant to safety concerns. These hardened laboratory facilities are unique and will allow continuation of a long tradition of research leadership in these areas by the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

The FXB Building also provides facilities for advanced research in fluid dynamics and combustion rivaled by few facilities elsewhere. A special feature is the absence of windows in the laboratory wing, which provides the darkroom-like and well-controlled environment needed for the sensitive optical diagnostics that are widely used in these research fields. The unique facilities allow continued development of research leadership in the physics of turbulence, turbulent combustion phenomena and multiphase flow by the Department of Aerospace Engineering.