Main navigation | Main content
Office: ME 238
Phone: 612-625-5502
Email: esparrow@umn.edu
Ph.D. 1952, M.A. 1950, Mechanical Engineering, Harvard University
M.S. 1949, B.S. 1948, Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Member of the National Academy of Engineering
Eph Sparrow is a generalist who works on a very broad range of problems which encompass all of mechanical engineering and is both focused and motivated by industrial applications. He has guided 87 PhDs and 215 MSs to completion and has published 750 papers in archival journals. He believes that there is no facet of mechanical engineering that should not be investigated.
He is also in charge of the Laboratory for Engineering Practice whose function is to undertake both industrially based and fundamental problems. The lab is well equipped with instrumentation and other equipment sufficient to deal with virtually any project in mechanical engineering. He believes that the optimal approach to complex problems is a synergistic interaction between experimentation and numerical simulation.
Sparrow also teaches computationally based courses which are highly effective in solving problems of a highly complex nature. These include fluid flow, heat transfer, structures, particle flows, fluid-structure interactions, and fluid-thermal-structure interactions. He and his team use these skills across the board in all manner of research and development projects.
He believes that the key feature in learning is continuous interactions between himself and students and between students who work on diverse projects. These interactions enhance learning for all concerned. A sample of the types of projects that are and have been solved by Sparrow and his team are as follows:
| CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGIES New fuels Conveyence of nanoparticles Lubricity for biomedical devices Photovoltaics Wind engineering Biomedical devices and therapies |
BIOMEDICAL HEAT and FLUID FLOW Biomedical device development Drug delivery Blood flow analysis Biomedical thermal management Urether stents Temperature based therapies Assessment of necrosis Mass transfer processes |
|---|---|
HEAT TRANSFER |
FLUID FLOW Turbulence modeling Computational fluid dynamics Fluid-structure interactions Fluid-thermal interactions Velocity instrumentation Pressure instrumentation Fluid flow control Flow visualization Numerical simulation Fluid flow laboratory Two-phase flow Piping systems |
| PROCESSES Friction stir welding Polymer processing Web-based processing HVAC Total energy wheels |
Sparrow and his team are eager to undertake and to solve all industrially based projects.
Laboratory for Engineering Practice
