Lloyd Eldred

Dr. Lloyd B. Eldred is a 1986 graduate of Virginia Tech’s Aerospace and Ocean Engineering Department. He received his Ph.D. from the department in 1993. For nearly 30 years he has worked as a NASA contractor and civil servant at multiple NASA centers.

His work at NASA has focused on multidisciplinary systems analysis of aerospace vehicles including subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic aircraft as well as launch vehicles, entry vehicles and surface landers. This work has largely been at the conceptual design level where he creates vehicle designs and models and predicts structural masses for multiple possible design concepts. He created and released for public use the parametric automated finite element model generation program “Loft.” He served for four years as a subproject manager on NASA’s Advanced Composites Program (ACP) where he led the Accurate Strength and Life Prediction technical challenge.

His other leadership roles have included serving as the lead of the Center Interdisciplinary Leadership Team (IDLT) for Structures, Team lead for structural analysis for the Vehicle Analysis Branch, Systems Analysis lead for the Ares V and HLS payload fairing, and Lead for Fluid-Thermal-Structures Interaction (FTSI) for Langley’s hypersonics work.

Education/Professional Experience

Ph.D. Aerospace Engineering (1993), M.S. Aerospace Engineering (1989), B.S. Aerospace & Ocean Engineering (1986), Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University.

Dr. Eldred started his career with a post-doctoral position at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) located at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio. He followed up with contracting positions at NASA’s Ames Research Center (Mountain View, CA), Langley Research Center (Hampton, VA) and Wallops Flight Facility (Wallops Island, VA). In 2007 he became a civil servant at Langley.

Select Publications

• Loft software request, https://software.nasa.gov/software/LAR-18704-1
• Eldred, L. B., “Loft: An Automated Mesh Generator for Stiffened Shell Aerospace Vehicles,” NASA /TM-20230001772, July 2023.
• Eldred, Lloyd B., Padula, Sharon L. Li, Wu, “Enabling Rapid and Robust Structural Analysis During Conceptual Design.” NASA/TM-2015-0002820.
• Eldred, L.B., Baker, W.P., Palazotto, A.N. “Kelvin-Voigt versus a Fractional Derivative Model as Constitutive Relations for Viscoelastic Materials,” AIAA Journal, Vol. 33, No. 3, March 1995, pp 547-550.

Hobbies/Interests

Dr. Eldred has interests in both high tech gadgetry and medieval history. He runs personal blogs about both. LloydTech.org has articles on electric cars, 3-D printing, and more. LearnFiore.org has articles and videos about a 1409 historic combat system including swordplay techniques.