The department is organized into five divisions of instruction.
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Fluid Mechanics, Propulsion, and Energy Conversion: This division includes the
disciplines and technologies important to aerospace propulsion, energy
conversion, and fluid dynamic-based forces and moments in the context of flight
vehicle design, and the exploitation of basic fluid properties in various
engineering applications. The interdisciplinary approach necessary to
successfully engineer advanced vehicle, propulsion, and energy conversion
systems is emphasized.
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Materials and Structures: Reducing the structural weight fractions of aircraft and
spacecraft has motivated aerospace engineers to create new structural forms;
develop and exploit new materials such as engineered, active, and filamentary
composite materials; investigate the active control of structures; invent new
analytical and numerical techniques for structural analysis; and pursue
aggressively a better understanding of failure, longevity, and resistance to
extreme environments. These activities are considered in the context of
manufacturing and overall cost-effectiveness.
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Information and Control Engineering: Areas of interest include the
traditional disciplines of guidance, navigation, and control, as well as an
increasing emphasis on autonomy, communications, and the hardware and software
elements that implement these capabilities in aerospace vehicles. In many
instances, the functions provided by aerospace information systems are critical
to life or mission success. Hence, safety, fault-tolerance, certification, and
validation are significant areas of inquiry.
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Humans and Automation: This division addresses issues related to how humans interact
with aerospace vehicles, including information-related and life support
aspects. Automation includes the processing of information, decision-making, the
human as an element of an automated system, and interaction between humans and
automatic control systems.
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Aerospace Systems: This division is responsible for instruction and research in
systems engineering, a discipline that denotes the methodologies used in the
architecting, design, manufacture, and operation of the highly complex and
demanding systems in the field of aeronautics and astronautics. The systems
approach considers all factors important to the performance, economic
viability, manufacture, acceptability, and operation of engineering
systems—technical, social, environmental, production, financial, and safety
aspects—and attempts to find optimal tradeoffs among them.
The Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering is one of the oldest Departments at MIT.
The faculty of the department is organized in three somewhat overlapping
groups: Environmental Systems, Engineering Systems, and Mechanics of Civil and
Environmental Systems. The Master of Science degree is offered in the following
areas:
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Environmental Chemistry and Biology
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Construction Engineering and Management
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Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Coastal Engineering
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Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
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Hydrology
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Information Technology
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Structures and Materials
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Transportation
For example, the Construction Engineering and Management program
offers a perspective on the changes and challenges facing the industry. The
goal of the program is to teach graduate students how to apply what they learn
to the discovery, development and advancement of technology, analytical
methods, and management strategies to improve productivity, quality, and
competitiveness within the industry's domestic and international markets.
One can group the courses in 11 areas:
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Mechanical, dynamics and acoustics: courses include the study of
vibrations, wave propagation, and solid mechanics to name but a few.
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Systems dynamics and control: it deals with information theory, probability,
and robotics.
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Fluid mechanics and combustion: basic to more advanced concepts are introduced,
along with modeling.
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Materials, polymers and fibers.
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Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.
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Heat and mass transfer.
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Power systems.
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Experimental engineering: students learn how to use lab instruments and to make simulations
using software like MATLAB or CAD.
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Design.
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Biomedical engineering addresses medical devices and quantitative physiology.
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Manufacturing focuses on optimization and manufacturing
processes.