Contact: Bob Ratliff
Two Mississippi State University faculty members recently used the Internet to edit a new technical guide that includes more than 50 contributors from around the world.
The Handbook of Grid Generation was prepared for publication by MSU aerospace engineering professors Joe Thompson and Bharat Soni, along with University of Wales professor Nigel Weatherill, who currently is an adjunct MSU faculty member.
Released by CRC Press of Boca Raton, Fla., the handbook includes some 37 chapters by scientists from France, Germany, Korea, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland, Taiwan, The Netherlands, United States, and Wales.
"If it had to be done with telephone calls and letters, I wouldn't have begun the project," Thompson said. "It would have been an almost impossible task without e-mail."
Using electronic technology, the far-flung writers transmitted drafts of their individual chapters to the MSU campus. They also posed and responded to questions without having to consider time differences or the headaches of international telephone connections.
"We often waited a day to get a response from someone in Russia or Korea, but it was easier than communicating by phone across international time zones," Thompson said. "In fact, it was almost as easy as working with only Mississippi authors."
The book presents computer-generated grid representations as a better way of solving engineering problems. Soni and Thompson, as well as aerospace engineering professor Zahir Warsi and mechanical engineering professor David Marcum, have conducted pioneering work in the field. All work at MSU's National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center.
Warsi and Marcum wrote chapters, as did retired mathematics professor Wayne Mastin. Among other MSU contributors were former graduate students Brian Jean and Tzu-Yi Yu, and former computer science professor Bernd Hamann.
Jean now works at the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg. Yu teaches at Chaoyang University of Technology in Taiwan; Hamann, at the University of California-Davis.