The Aeronautics Department at Princeton was founded in 1942. It merged with the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1964 to become the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences (AMS). This new department combined the full activity of the old AE Department based at Forrestal with the activities of the old ME Department based in the Engineering Quadrangle, in a new building completed in 1962 to house the entire School of Engineering and Applied Science. The Department took its present name in 1978.
The Gas Dynamics Laboratory grew out of the original work by Lester Lees who joined the faculty in 1946. One of the first new research appointments was Seymour Bogdonoff who had been a colleague of Lees at the NACA. He came to Princeton in 1946 with Lees to become his Assistant in Research. They were studying, theoretically and experimentally, the problems of boundary layers and their interaction with shock waves. Many graduate students were interested in this area and one of them received one of the department’s first Ph.D.s in 1949. When Lees left in 1953, Bogdonoff took over the program, and founded the Gas Dynamics Laboratory in 1954. He was the Director until 1989 when he was succeeded by Lex Smits.
Welcome to the Princeton University Gasdynamics website.We have three main activities in the lab:
- Supersonic and hypersonic turbulent boundary layers and shock-wave interactions
- High Reynolds number boundary layers and wakes
- Unsteady propulsion and the hydrodynamics of swimming
