Monthly Archives August 2022

We are pleased to announce and congratulate lab member Perla Latorre-Suarez as part of Aviation Week’s 20 Twenties Class of 2022. This prestigious annual list is compiled by Aviation Week Network in collaboration with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics to identify the most promising 20 students with the potential to lead change within the aerospace industry in the near future. Almost 100 students were nominated worldwide, with the winners being selected based on leadership skills, STEM innovation and academic excellence. To read the official announcement of winners by Aviation Week Network, click here.

Perla will be honored for all of her hard work during the Aviation Week Network’s 65th Annual Laureate Awards and Dinner in Washington, D.C. later this year. Perla’s award has also been the subject to a UCF Today article, which can be read here.

Jan Erik Förster, a Ph.D. student under Dr. Ravisankar Naraparaju, from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) visited UCF earlier this month. He presented his work at a UCF Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Special Seminar. His work, “Influence of Niobium coating on the oxidation behavior of Zr2B2”, focused on characterizing a novel protective overlay coating for ultra-high temperature ceramics for reusable hypersonic vehicle applications. Specifically Erik is investigating and working towards reducing the oxidation behavior of zirconium diboride coatings and their subsequent thermochemical reactions.

While at UCF Erik also toured of the Raghavan Research Group lab, where ongoing projects and collaborations were discussed.

We are pleased to announce that Zachary Stein has won Best Poster Award while representing our laboratory at the Irsee Thermal and Environmental Barrier Coatings VI conference. This conference was held in Irsee, Germany from June 19 – 24, 2022 and occurs once every 4 years. While at the conference, Zac presented his poster titled “Non-Destructively Capturing CMAS Degradation of EB-PVD Thermal Barrier Coatings through 3D Confocal Raman Renderings”. Zac, a former a Fulbright Fellow and current NDSEG fellow, presented research conducted as part of the UCF and DLR (German Aerospace Center) collaboration on high temperature materials funded by a National Science Foundation International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) program.

This work was result of international collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as well as with Dr. Laurene Tetard from the Nanoscience Technology Center at UCF and was made possible through National Science Foundation IRES. 

Last week, our postdoc Quentin Fouliard was present at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to prepare future in-situ high-temperature setups of our upcoming experiments at the neutron diffraction beamline and to give a seminar talk entitled “Increasing the efficiency of gas turbine engines combining novel designs and in-situ monitoring instrumentation”. He worked with Henry Bright, our undergraduate student who currently works at Oak Ridge in a 10-week internship program called Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI). They worked on experimental setup designs and planification in close collaboration with Dr. Jeff Bunn, beamline scientist and our host at ORNL.

We are pleased to announce that Remelisa Esteves has been accepted into the 24th National School on Neutron and X-Ray Scattering (NXS) this summer! This school is organized by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, where Remelisa participated in lectures presented by researchers from academia, industry, and national laboratories. She also performed short experiments to get hands-on experience using neutron and synchrotron sources.

This summer, Henry Bright is working as an intern for 10 weeks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as part of the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships program. He works within their Neutron Scattering Division and is focused on using neutron diffraction to characterize residual strain and stress within additively manufactured metals. This data is obtained using the High Intensity Diffractometer for Residual stress Analysis (HIDRA) at the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at ORNL. Henry is using his time at HFIR to prepare a plan for implementing a furnace onto HIDRA to simulate the high temperature environment of a gas turbine engine. During our next experiment time, this will allow us to characterize residual stresses in two previously prepared Inconel 718 samples to determine the viability of additively manufactured metals for aerospace applications.

Last August, UCF received a grant to create transformative space technologies by bringing together interdisciplinary teams of faculty and students to work on projects through NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Space Technology Artemis Research, or M-STAR, initiative. Our laboratory has 3 MSTAR fellows on summer internships as part of their research efforts.

Perla is a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in aerospace engineering and is a fellow student of the UCF-MSTAR program. This Summer, Perla is working as an intern at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia. Perla is designing a coating to protect the lunar structures from the lunar dust. During her internship, she was introduced to instruments that will help her to perform experiments that will determine the durability of the ceramic coating in the lunar environment. Perla is also studying the adhesion forces of the lunar dust at the surface of the structures used in the lunar environment.

 

Oneilia Swaby is a recent grad who will be starting her PhD program at the University of Central Florida in the fall. For the past month, Oneilia has had the amazing opportunity to work as a student intern at the NASA Langley Research Center.  During her internship she has gained a real interest in metallic materials and how they can be improved for multifunctional aerospace applications. She has also receive numerous training on equipment that will prove beneficial in her future research. She is very excited to take the knowledge gained there and apply it to her future PhD research.

 

 

Katrina Gucwa is pursuing her Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering at UCF. Through the MSTAR program and FSGC support, she was chosen to intern at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center this summer. Her internship is based out of Swamp Works, a lab dedicated to developing new methods of in-situ resource utilization with a rapid research and development mindset. Her research centers around two topics: cryovolcanism, and the abrasive and adhesive effects of lunar regolith on various materials.