Fri, 06/03/2016

Our students made an unprecedented clean sweep of the awards in both the Undergraduate and Masters’ categories at the 2016 AIAA Region VI Student Conference at Oregon State University in April. The winners are:

Undergraduate:

• 1st:   Mia Lee – "Tunable Bistability of Origami-based Mechanical Metamaterials" (Advisor: Prof. Yang, Mentor: Hiromi Yasuda)
• 2nd:  Zhisong Chen – "Leaf-out Origami with Multi-Configuration Stability" (Advisor: Prof. Yang, Mentor: Hiromi Yasuda) 
• 3rd:   Lucas Heflin  – "Baffled Tube Ram Accelerator Structural Design" (Advisor: Prof.Knowlen)

Masters:

• 1st:   Jake Boening  – "Design and Experimental Investigation of a Continuously Rotating Detonation Engine Initiated by Azimuthally Sequential Sparking" (Advisors: Profs. Knowlen and Kurosaka)
• 2nd:  Navid Daneshvaran  – "Transient Computational Fuid Dynamic Modeling of Baffled Tube Ram Accelerator in Eulerian Frame of Reference" (Advisor: Prof. Knowlen)
• 3rd:   Wei-Siang Lay – "Design of a Rail Gun System for Mitigating Disruptions in Fusion Reactors" (Advisor: Dr. Raman)

Also presenting papers were: Kendall Dale in the Undergraduate Category, Richard Grist and Jeff Glusman in the Graduate Category, and Ryan Fowler in the Team Category. 

Congratulations to all of these outstanding students!

Fri, 06/03/2016

Congratulations to Thao Nguyen for receiving the College of Engineering Dean’s Medal in recognition of her excellence in research. Thao, a Chemical Engineering student, works as an undergraduate research assistant on an NSF-sponsored project in A&A Professor Jim Hermanson’s Combustion Lab, where they are studying the explosive vaporization of superheated liquid droplets.  Read more.

Thu, 06/02/2016 | UW Today

A team led by University of Washington engineers has developed a new tool that could aid in the quest for better batteries and fuel cells. Although battery technology has come a long way since Alessandro Volta first stacked metal discs in a “voltaic pile” to generate electricity, major improvements are still needed to meet the energy challenges of the future, such as powering electric cars and storing renewable energy cheaply and efficiently. The key likely lies in the nanoscale.... Read more at UW Today.

Tue, 05/24/2016

Dr.  Leland Nicolai (BS ‘57), renowned educator, author, and aircraft designer, has been selected as the department’s 2016 Distinguished Alumnus. Dr. Nicolai will be the keynote speaker at our graduation celebration on June 10, 2016, and will be honored there by our faculty, our students and their families and guests.

Thu, 05/05/2016

Congratulations to Professor Uri Shumlak, whose ZaP Flow Z-Pinch project received the “UW Greenest Lab Award”. This is a particularly fitting award for a research project that seeks to develop a carbon-free effectively-limitless energy source - fusion energy - that has applications for space power and propulsion. The UW Green Laboratory Certification Program recognizes laboratories at UW that operate and behave sustainably within their laboratory space. The ZaP Flow Z-Pinch Lab received the highest ranking score which demonstrates excellence in their efforts to reduce the environmental impact at the UW. Learn more about what it takes to get the UW Green Laboratory Certification: https://green.uw.edu/green-laboratory/certification

Wed, 04/06/2016

Wed, 04/06/2016

Professor Jim Hermanson received a three-year Fulbright Award to work at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity at the University of Bremen in Germany. Hermanson will work there with Dipl.-Eng. Christian Eigenbroad, head of Aerospace Combustion Engineering, on a study of combustion behavior of oxygen droplets under cryogenic conditions.

Thu, 02/11/2016 | Puget Sound Engineering Council

Wed, 02/10/2016 | PR Newswire | Penton

Graduate student Pablo Trefftz Posada has received a 2016 Aviation Week '20 Twenties' Award. Pablo was one of 20 students selected nationally in recognition of his academic acumen, the value of his research and his contribution to the broader community. Pablo, who works with Professor Antonino Ferrante, will be honored at the Aviation Week annual Laureate Awards banquet on March 3rd in Washington, D.C., where he will be highlighted to the leaders of the world's top aerospace companies and agencies. He will also be featured in  the February 29th digital and print publication of Aviation Week & Space Technology.

Wed, 01/27/2016 | National Science Foundation

Congratulations to Professor JK Yang who has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. The $500,000, five-year grant is  for his research project: Structure-borne Noise and Vibration Mitigation via Nonlinear Interactions in Phononic Structures. Read more.

Thu, 01/21/2016

Dalton Waldock, a senior from Briarcliff Manor High School in New York was just selected as an Intel Science Talent Search semi-finalist. Dalton spent last summer working as an intern in Professor John Slough’s Plasma Dynamics Laboratory as part of a College Science Research class. Dalton worked with his mentor, A&A graduate student Jordan Neuhoff, to measure the energy of plasma emitted from a Pre-Ionizer, which destabilizes atoms to create plasma and free electrons. This experiment has real-world implications for space travel by potentially enabling a space probe to reach its destination efficiently and have enough fuel to return to Earth. Dalton was selected as an Intel semi-finalist based on the strength of his research and his paper, titled, “Spectroscopic Measurements Versus Langmuir Probe Analyses of RF Plasma.” 

Tue, 01/12/2016 | National Science Foundation

Congratulations to Professor Anshu Narang-Siddarth, who has just received a National Science Foundation CAREER award. The $500,000, five-year grant is for her project "CAREER: Breakthroughs in Dynamical Modeling and Control for Reduction of Catastrophic Aviation Accidents." Read more.

Tue, 01/12/2016

Congratulations to doctoral student Max Spetzler, who was the overall winner of the 2016 AIAA SciTech Guidance, Navigation & Control Conference Graduate Student Paper Competition. He was selected from among all participants for his paper and presentation titled, "Local Linear Controllability and Observability Analysis of Nonlinear Systems with Continuation Methods." Max, who  works with Professor Anshu Narang-Siddarth, was recognized at the January Conference awards luncheon in San Diego, California. This is the second year in a row that Max, has been selected the overall winner of this competition!

Fri, 12/04/2015 | Voice of America

Drones could be a key technology of the future, and job prospects for those who know how to design, build and control them look good. That's why colleges and universities around the USA are starting to offer degrees in unmanned aerial systems. One of them is the University of Washington in Seattle. Aeronautics research scientist Christopher Lum works with students in the Autonomous Flight Systems Laboratory to explore how civilian drones can safely share the skies with manned aircraft. Read more...

Tue, 11/17/2015

The Society for Advanced Rocket Propulsion (SARP) is a student rocket engineering team at the University of Washington. Our mission is to design, build, test, and launch an advanced hybrid sounding rocket. We are looking to raise $15,000 to cover materials for building the rocket, testing, and travel expenses to launch this year’s rocket to 25,000 feet at the ESRA Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) this June. We are also partnering with Neighborhood House in West Seattle to help K-12 students build a scientific payload to be launched on our rocket. Help SARP Launch into the Future! Support this project today.

Thu, 10/15/2015

We are very pleased to announce the establishment of a new research collaboration between our department and the Boeing Company in the area of high-performance fly-by-wire flight control technology. Flight control involves a wide array of issues surrounding the design and implementation of control laws for aircraft longitudinal and lateral dynamics during distinct flight envelops. As Boeing moves towards the development of highly efficient airplanes, flight controls have been pushed towards more optimized control system architectures and designs. This push in turn has direct implications for the product development design cycle and comprehensive system-wide optimization and integration. Facilitated by advances in optimization-based techniques for control system design and the availability of analysis and synthesis approaches for nonlinear control, in this project, the UW research team has proposed the initiation of a long term relationship between the controls group at the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Flight Controls group at Boeing. The project is led by Professors Mehran Mesbahi and Kristi Morgansen at UW and Dr. Kioumars Najmabadi at Boeing.

Wed, 10/14/2015

Professor and Chair Anthony Waas has been selected to receive the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Award for 2016. This award is presented to an individual who has been responsible for an outstanding recent technical or scientific contribution in aerospace structures, structural dynamics, or materials. Professor Waas was recognized for his pioneering contributions to the development of the innovative, experimentally validated, computational methods for progressive damage analysis of polymer and hot ceramic composite materials and structures. He will be honored at the AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition held January 4-8, 2016 in San Diego, California.

Sat, 08/22/2015

On August 20, 2015, a team of UW Engineering Students joined industry partners in the Columbia Gorge to begin work on a new Joint Center for Aerospace Technology & Innovation (JCATI) project focused on developing both hardware and software components necessary to perform seamless UAS operations and monitoring in GPS-denied environments. This system would help maintain aircraft tracking and situational awareness in the event of loss of GPS by an Unmanned Aircraft, allowing for safe integration of UAS into the National Airspace System. The developed set of tools and protocols would increase shared situation awareness between relevant aviation stakeholders such as UAS operators and air-traffic control centers.

This project was awarded by JCATI to UW PI Dr. Christopher Lum and UW Professor Emeritus Juris Vagners in collaboration with Hood Tech Corp, ANPC, Sagetech, and Insitu.

Tue, 08/18/2015

Isaac Statnekov’s passion for aerospace began early. His grandfather, who worked on the Saturn Rocket at McDonnell Douglas Corp., encouraged Isaac to pursue engineering. Isaac studied aerospace books as a child, and in high school, wrote a 40 page paper on the history of aeronautics in the twentieth century. He began a research project in his first quarter in A&A, working with Professor Carl Knowlen on the Ram Accelerator, and later on fabrication of a prototype shock wave reactor, work that continued through his senior year. Read more...

Tue, 08/11/2015 | UW Today

DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced $30 million in funding for nine groundbreaking new projects aimed at developing prototype technologies to explore new pathways for fusion power, and one of the recipients is the team led by Uri Shumlak, Associate Chair for Research and Professor in Aeronautics & Astronautics. Prof. Uri Shumlak received $4.8 million for “Development of a Compact Fusion Device based on the Flow Z-Pinch".

Tue, 08/11/2015 | GeekWire

Nao Murakami, a PhD student working with Prof. Robert Winglee, reached the finals for selection of pilot scripts for the new show The Next MacGyver.

Over 2000 scripts were submitted, and Nao's was one of 12 to reach the finals. She attended the final competition in LA where five scripts were selected from the 12. You can read about Nao's vision for the show on UW News. The full story was published on Geekwire.

Sat, 11/16/2024 | Live Science

A&A's Professor Jim Hermanson speaks to Live Science on the history of human loss in space.

Sat, 11/16/2024 | UW Aero & Astro

Sat, 11/16/2024

This university-wide award is given annually to a staff member who does an outstanding job serving their graduate program. The criteria for the award are: 1) an effective liaison between the graduate program and the Graduate School, 2) a proactive advisor for students regarding their graduate studies and Graduate School policies and processes and, 3) a proactive advisor for the Graduate Program Coordinators and Chairs regarding Graduate School policies and processes.

Please join us in congratulating Ed on his achievement!