Auditorium (AE 005), Department of Aerospace Engineering

Turbulence remains one of the outstanding problems of classical physics, and one that has challenged physicists and engineers alike for decades, even centuries. The fusion of classical approaches and tools of the modern day – theoretical analysis of the Navier-Stokes equations, state-of-the-art experimental observations, data-driven methods and machine learning – has led to substantial progress […]

. Explosions in coal mines, metal-processing facilities, and other industrial settings occur with alarming regularity, while reactive metal particles are being considered for energy-storage and propulsion applications. Despite a long history of research and its importance to safety and propulsion applications, the physical mechanisms that govern the ignition, combustion, and detonation of reactive particles remain […]

Autonomous robots operating in challenging environments must make reliable decisions under geometric, dynamic, and environmental constraints. In such settings, motion planning plays a central role in enabling robots to move safely and efficiently through cluttered, narrow, disconnected or uncertain spaces, while balancing feasibility, robustness, and computational efficiency. This talk will focus on motion planning for […]

As civil and military aircraft evolve toward increasingly complex designs and intelligent systems, understanding pilot–vehicle interactions and their impact on safety and performance remains essential. Rotorcraft shipboard landing is among the most demanding flight operations, requiring pilots to contend with degraded and rapidly changing visual cues, deck motion, and environmental disturbances, often resulting in elevated […]

AI in general and Agentic AI Frameworks in particular have begun to appear in safety critical and mission critical application of autonomous systems. Assurance of their behavior lags behind in terms of principles, tools and engineering practice. In this presentation I will cover some emerging approaches that are both powerful and practical, and easily understood […]

Fluid flows in nature and engineering exhibit a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. This talk presents two problems across this range: compressible turbulence in channel flows and large-scale vorticity dynamics in the tropical atmosphere. The first part of the talk focuses on compressible turbulence, which plays a key role in many aerospace flows, […]

A mathematical framework is presented to guide the search for Rayleigh waves in lattice materials based on periodic structure theory and the Bloch theorem. Architected materials with a periodic microstructure are distinguished from crystals in continuum anisotropic elasticity by the presence of at least one length scale and a band structure with partial and complete […]

Over the past decade, the fluidic pinball has become a valuable benchmarkfor studying flow control strategies. The configuration consists of three independently rotating cylinders positioned at the vertices of an equilateral triangle, with the flow directed perpendicularly to one of its sides. The cylinder rotation rates serve as the control inputs, while velocity sensors located […]