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Paul Allaire
Wade Professor
Telephone: (434) 924-6209
Office: MEC 317
E-mail: pea@virginia.edu
Paul Allaire is the Wade Professor of Engineering. He earned his B.S. and M.E. degrees from Yale and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern in 1971. He has been a faculty member at the University of Virginia since 1972.
Dr. Allaire’s research interests span several areas of rotating machinery: bearings, rotor dynamics, seals, controls and fluid flows. His primary research interest at this time is in magnetic bearings, including bearing design, shaft dynamics, and controls. He is also active in biomechanics research. He has published over 140 technical publications including over 50 refereed journal publications and one textbook on finite elements. He has had extensive funded research programs with government and industry over the past 25 years. A major research activity is the design, development and testing of a magnetic bearing supported artificial heart for human implantation. Several prototypes have been successfully testing in pumping both water and blood. Much research activity is underway to improve the magnetic bearing designs, enhance control system design using robust control methods (such as sliding mode, H, Q parameterization and others), real time computer controls, development of self sensing algorithms, design of more efficient pumps, computational fluids analysis of the flow in the heart pump, and other aspects. Dr. Allaire is the Director of the Virginia Artificial Heart Research Program. The project is in collaboration with the Utah Artificial Heart Laboratory and Medquest Products, Inc.
Dr. Allaire is directing research in magnetic bearings and controls for high speed energy storage flywheels, funded by NASA Goddard and American Flywheel Systems. He also works on finite element analysis and losses magnetic bearings, funded by NASA Lewis.
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