Professor George's research is concerned with the aerodynamics and design of aircraft and ground vehicles. His work has been on aeroacoustic noise mechanism and the aerodynamics performance and design of aircraft, automobiles, and engine cooling. Other interests involve systems engineering, knowledge engineering, and manufacturing. Approaches are a mix of analytical, computational, and experimental with some interation with other experimenters.

The research in aerodynamics has dealt with subsonic to hypersonic speeds, with many applications to problems of noise generation. His group developed an explanation for many sonic-boom effects, and pioneered in the development of realistic aircraft configurations for the minimization of sonic boom. Other work concerned the generation of noise by helicopters, tilt rotors, propellers, and other rotors. Mechanisms that we have explained, and developed predictions for, include various sources of broadband noise due to turbulence effects, blade/vortex interaction noise and tilt-rotor noise. A continuing project concerns aerodynamics and aerodynamic noise or "wind noise" in passenger automobiles.

One present focus is on the identification of flow mechanisms and the design of features that expedite flow around wheeled ground vehicles. In this work, which is largely experimental, idealized and scale-model vehicles are tested in a wind tunnel with both moving and stationary ground planes.  The results are also used to determine the applicabilty of computational fluid dynamcs calculations we make in a related program. We have identified the mechanisms of "ground effect" automobile flows and shown their implications for design.

An ongoing project studies the aerodynamics and heat transfer associated with engine and vehicle performance. including cooling and turbocharging.  Other work is on frame and suspension design.

Other active projects involves developing systems engineering approaches to system design and to knowledge management for organizations developing complex systems.  This work is carried out in conjunction with large student team design-build projects such as the Cornell Formula SAE team.

Professor George received his PhD in Aeospace and Mechanical Engineering.  He has directed Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the Center for Manufacturing Enterprise, and the Systems Engineering Program at Cornell. He was a visiting senior fellow at the University of Southampton, England in 1971-72, a section head at BMW automobiles in 1987-88, and a senior research associate at the Aeromechanics Laboratory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center in California in 1988. In 1996-97 he was a scholar-in-residence at Harley-Davidson Motor Company. George is an fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a member of the American Helicopter Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), and past chairman of the Wind-Noise Committee of the SAE. He was awarded the AIAA Aeroacoustics Award in 1997 for his work on sonic boom, helicopter noise, and automobile aeroacoustic noise. The Cornell Formula SAE team he leads has won the Formula SAE championship nine times including four of the last six years.