Sophrodyne Aerospace

Sophrodyne Aerospace is a research and design consultancy, based in Glasgow, Scotland and led by Dr Richard E Brown.

We specialise in providing responsive, research-quality aerodynamic expertise to enterprises large and small, helping them to understand, innovate and produce on commercial timescales. In the last few years, we have assisted many companies and organisations around the world in developing new aerodynamic tools, applying existing methodologies with confidence, and suggesting and implementing new and innovative solutions to aerodynamic design problems.

Our expertise is founded on a deep understanding of aerodynamic theory. Dr Brown has published over a hundred technical articles on aerospace subjects and has a wide range of experience in aeronautical systems from rotorcraft to hypersonic spaceplanes. Indeed, the company philosophy is that the best way of attacking an aerodynamic problem is to first express it in terms of a mathematical model of the physical system - at least as far as it is currently understood.

Unlike "ideas" or "hunches", an explicit, simple mathematical model is a tangible object with which the human intellect can engage and interact. A good model allows the strength of your understanding of the problem to be exploited directly in being able to predict the properties of the system that are of interest to you. But often even more important is the fact that predictive errors in the same model are very often an indication of a deficiency somewhere in understanding the problem properly. The key advantage thus of the model-building process during the development of a product is that it invariably promotes the sort of interaction with the problem in which these lapses in understanding can be exposed and rectified before they can cause too much harm.

We specialise in guiding our clients through the process of developing their physical understanding of their system through the development and application of mathematical models. We are particularly skilled in selecting the modelling approach that is most appropriate to the problem at hand - from simple analytical tools that can be run in seconds to support preliminary design and optimisation, to advanced computational tools that take hours or days to run but are capable of squeezing out the last few percent of performance from a system or of determining the subtleties at the heart of a pernicious aerodynamic interaction that is limiting the potential of an established design.

Dr Brown also has an international reputation as a public speaker and educator, and has presented talks and courses around the world on various topics of aeronautical interest, including the future of air transport, rotorcraft aerodynamics and flight mechanics, and the history of aerodynamics. He has also provided technical input to several important legal cases, where a clear understanding of underlying physics has proved vital to the outcome of proceedings.

We invite you to browse the links at right to see how we can bring responsive, research quality aerodynamic expertise to your enterprise.