Q&A
Questions for Kara Peters
Dr. Kara Peters, associate professor of aerospace engineering, designs and studies sensors that are built into space-age airplane components, work that puts her on the cutting edge of modern aircraft design. She talks about her research, her students and her work on bringing a major aerospace manufacturer to North Carolina.
Your research deals with composite structures found in airplanes. How are these different from traditional aircraft materials? More and more, aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing and Airbus are using composite components such as carbon fiber and graphite fiber reinforced epoxies and others in their designs. Composites are lighter than traditional aluminum-type materials, which means the plane uses less fuel.
You also design sensors that monitor these composites during flight. Why are these sensors needed? Composites have their strengths, but they also present a different set of challenges. For example, if a maintenance person drops a hammer on an aluminum wing, it’s going to visibly damage the wing. With composites, however, the damage will first occur on the interior and won’t be immediately visible. And since composite materials are made of several different constituents, it’s more difficult to predict when those materials will fail as they age. My work focuses on using optical fibers and sensors built into the aircraft that monitor those materials during flight and send information about them to people in the cockpit and on the ground.
NC State helped bring Spirit AeroSystems to Kinston, NC. How were you involved in this? Spirit came to NC State for a day when the state was negotiating with them, and there were several of us who gave presentations and talked to them while they were here. It’s great news that they’re coming here.
Why is the Spirit announcement so important for your work? The strongest impact is on the students. The facility won’t open until next year, but my undergraduates are already talking about it. They’ll be able to visit a large-scale composites manufacturing center and see that great jobs are available right here in North Carolina for people doing this work.
You left Lausanne, Switzerland, where you did your post-doc work, to come here. What attracted you to NC State? The job really fit what I wanted to do, and there was this general enthusiasm here. Out of the various places where I interviewed, NC State was by far the strongest in terms of people really liking where they worked.
You’ve been here nine years now. Would you say they were right? Absolutely.
Dean Martin-Vega has brought a burst of energy, and people are excited about
that. There’s much more talk about becoming the nation’s top public
engineering school and what we need to do to get there. And I think that has
a tremendous impact on people’s enthusiasm and the work they do. 