Monthly Archives January 2021

The 2021 International Research Experience for Students (IRES) team has been selected! Jillian Gloria, Max Fortin, Rosa Olivera, Samantha DeNicola, Michael Tonarely, Andrew Vigne, Benjamin Latrobe and Vanessa D’Esposito will join a vibrant and growing collaboration among UCF researchers and DLR scientists in advancing the research and education of combustion and materials technologies. They are a cross-disciplinary team of mechanical and aerospace engineers at both undergraduate and graduate levels whose research specialties include combustion, propulsion, materials, computational fluids, aerodynamics, and more. These students will spend the summer conducting research under the mentorship of scientists from UCF and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). To learn more about the program, click here. Learn more about the IRES students here and keep up with them through their blog page.

Dr. Raghavan, Dr. Vasu, and Dr. Terracciano hosted a two-part, virtual workshop called “Catalyzing New Space Technologies”, which is aimed at developing a stronger partnership with NASA for future space-related research. The first part of the workshop occurred on November 20, 2020, and the second part occurred on January 8, 2021. 

Part I of the workshop gathered internal UCF faculty members, who are interested in the space-related research, to create a discussion-friendly environment to gather ideas in the hopes of helping students become more involved and acquainted with the space industry during their undergraduate careers. Some prominent topics of discussions included coming up with better marketing strategies to make UCF a good prospect school for students interested in space, how faculty members could create partnerships between students and UCF alumni in the field, and how to aid project funding. Members of the workshop were later split into different breakout rooms to facilitate further discussion. Here, faculty members were asked to investigate NASA’s technology taxonomies to see where their research could fit in. 

Part II of the workshop featured two panel sessions with invited guests from industry, NASA centers, and consortiums to foster connections between industry and university with the aim to enhance competitiveness and readiness for NASA opportunities. This workshop is in response to UCF’s recent winning of a NASA planning grant awarded to UCF, “Mapping a Trajectory for STEM Readiness in Space Technology”, with the goal to facilitate industry and university collaborations to bring about innovative technologies for the Artemis Program and future missions. 

We are excited to announce that our lab members Quentin Fouliard and Johnathan Hernandez presented their research outcomes at the 2021 AIAA SciTech forum in the symposium Structural Health Monitoring and Prognosis II, held virtually today, on January 12. Their presentations discussed the results published in their papers “Delamination of Electron-Beam Physical-Vapor Deposition Thermal Barrier Coatings using Luminescent Layers” and “Characterization of corrosive defects through pulsed eddy current thermography for aircraft panels”.