Monthly Archives February 2020

Raghavan Research Group displayed some of its projects at the Burnett Honors College’s second Research Match Day, held this week at UCF to encourage top undergraduate students to become young researchers in our group. Lab members Khanh Vo, Johnathan Hernandez and Quentin Fouliard enthusiastically presented some of our team’s most recent research work such as the development of our novel Phosphor thermometry instrumentation for synchronized acquisition of luminescence lifetime decay and intensity on thermal barrier coatings, the methods for the Investigation of TGO stress in thermally cycled plasma-spray physical vapor deposition and electron-beam physical vapor deposition thermal barrier coatings via photoluminescence spectroscopy or the  Measurements for stress sensing of composites using tailored piezospectroscopic coatings.

We are glad to announce that our new article written in collaboration with Dr. Bauke Heeg (Lumium) is now published and available in Measurement Science and Technology under the special feature on Instrumentation for Gas Turbine Engines! This work was led by lab members Quentin Fouliard and Johnathan Hernandez and focuses on the development of a novel Phosphor Thermometry instrumentation setup which enables higher precision of temperature measurements as well as extended temperature ranges in turbine engine environments using luminescent erbium-europium co-doped yttria-stabilized zirconia coatings.

Watch the video discussion for this publication!

We are excited to announce that the University of Central Florida online newspaper Nicholson Student Media featured lab member Johnathan Hernandez in NSM Today on his visions for future hypersonic flight using materials and technologies that we are currently implementing in our lab. The article focuses on his research work and aspiration to pursue the development of hypersonic leading edge thermal protection technologies to enable reusable hypersonic vehicle applications.

We are thrilled to announce that the Florida High Tech Corridor online magazine featured lab member Quentin Fouliard in its Aerospace & Aviation section as he became the first UCF’s Aerospace Engineering Doctoral Graduate as a result of his successful research work in our group over the past few years, under the project funded by the US Department of Energy and aimed to the advancement of instrumentation for temperature measurements in turbine engine environments.

Dr. Ravisankar Naraparaju, Dr. Peter Mechnich and Christoph Mikulla from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) visited UCF last week. Dr. Naraparaju presented his work in a Distinguished Speaker Series seminar on the “Development of Thermal Barrier Coatings that are resistant to CMAS/Volcanic Ash attack in aero-engines” hosted by the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCF. The seminar explored the dangers posed by CMAS and volcanic ash ingression in TBCs and highlighted the importance of tailoring TBC microstructure to prevent crack propagation which can lead to engine catastrophic failure.

The DLR team also visited the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at UCF. A tour of the Raghavan Research Group lab was then given where ongoing projects and collaborations were discussed.