Division of Aerospace Engineering and Fluid Mechanics

News

SEMS Academics Perform Exceptionally in REF 2021 The scores have been announced for REF2021. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a 7 year cycle used to measure research and determine funding in UK universities. The result for SEMS is excellent as not only have we come seventh overall in Engineering amongst all 89 universities who were being assessed in … [more]

Congratulations to Hussain Abid for winning the second award at the 5th Russell Binions Memorial PhD Research Symposium Many congratulations to Hussain Abid for winning the second award for the presentation “Theoretical and computational modelling of airframe / propulsion interaction noise for reduced noise aircraft design” at the 5th Russell Binions Memorial PhD Research Symposium [more]

MEng Group Project Presentation prize awarded at ILF April 2022 Our MEng students presented their Research & Design Team Projects at the Industrial Liaison Forum on 6th April 2022. Our MEng students conduct team projects in their 4th year in groups of about 5 students. Currently towards the end of their projects, they were able to present a mix of prototypes, samples … [more]

MSc Extended Research Project poster prize winners at ILF April 2022 Our MSc students presented their Extended Research Projects at the Industrial Liaison Forum on 6th April 2022. Our MSc projects run from semester 1 through to August, so they are currently only about half-way through their projects. Nonetheless, they were able to give an excellent account of their work so far and … [more]

BEng Research Project poster prize winners at ILF April 2022 Selected 3rd year BEng students presented posters on their research projects at the Industrial Liaison on 6th April 2022. We had over 50 external visitors at the event from industry as well as Alumni. The posters were displayed at the Final Year Student Project Showcase in the morning, where a fantastic selection … [more]

SEMS Industrial Liaison Forum April 2022 Our bi-annual Industrial Liaison Forum was held in-person at Queen Mary University of London on 6th April 2022. We received over 50 external visitors from industry as well as Alumni. The day started with our final year student project showcase, where a fantastic selection of posters were presented by our BEng and … [more]

SEMS students working on Hyperloop project progress to the next stage of the 2022 European Hyperloop Week Hyperlink is a Queen Mary based student team developing a fully operational Hyperloop Pod prototype and researching the business, social and safety aspects of making the novel transportation system a reality. For the past two seasons, Hyperlink has been competing in the European Hyperloop Week conference. In January, the team … [more]

Dame Ann Dowling is awarded an honorary doctorate During the Graduation Ceremonies at Tobacco Dock Dame Ann Dowling OM DBE FRS FREng was awarded a DSc(Hon Caus). Dame Ann is one of the most distinguished engineers in the UK. She was first female Professor in Engineering at the University of Cambridge in 1993 and is now … [more]

SEMS Staff Receive Many Awards at the Science and Engineering Faculty Awards Ceremony. The Science and Engineering Faculty Celebration took place in the Octagon to a large assembled in person gathering and was broadcast simultaneously online to an even larger audience on the 27th January 2022. SEMS had a very large number of the awards with Andrew Spowage winning the Faculty Award for Internationalisation … [more]

Fan Li's Graduation Many congratulations to Fan Li on officially receiving his PhD Diploma. Nice meeting as the group  for a photo session on a sunny day in Queen Mary.

450 SEMS Alumni Graduate at Tobacco Dock It was with great relief that Queen Mary University of London was able to restart in person graduation ceremonies for the first time in more than two years at Tobacco Dock in Wapping. The first celebration for the School of Engineering and Materials Science (SEMS) students was on … [more]

The European Physical Journal E (EPJE) has chosen its cover figure of the December 2021 issue from our study on self-propelling Janus particles. The paper presents an analytical study of self-propelling Janus particles to predict the temperature and velocity fields.  The particles are powered by light irradiation of a defocused laser beam. Practical analytical approximations are given with good agreement with experiments. EJ Avital, T Miloh (2021) Self-thermophoresis of laser-heated spherical Janus particles, … [more]

Mohammed Deera awarded the James S Walker Award by IOM3 Mohammed Deera, a first class BEng Materials and Design graduate from 2020, has won the 2021 James S Walker Award from IOM3 for his final year project on "A Potential Route to Re-processable Natural Rubber". The idea that he explored experimentally was the creation of labile crosslinks that … [more]

Materials Celebrates 50 Years of Graduations 50 years of Materials graduates from the Mile End Campus in London and the first cohort from Queen Mary Engineering School (QMES) at our campus at Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi’an China were celebrated on Friday 5th November. 120 people gathered in the Octagon with another 45 people on-line to … [more]

Jet noise and aerofoil noise research The development of physically insightful low-order methods based on a combination of  Large Eddy Simulation accelerated on GPUs  with theoretical aeroacoustics methods is in making.

Aeroacoustics research group meetings It is nice to be back in office after the long covid break !

Sergey Karabasov elected to the grade of Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) AIAA Associate Fellows are individuals of distinction who have made notable and valuable contributions to the arts, sciences, or technology of aeronautics or astronautics. Sergey's citation states: "For career-long work in high-speed flow aeroacoustics for jet engines and rotor noise, pioneering use of Large Eddy Simulations … [more]

Queen Mary part of international research collaboration to prevent spread of Covid-19 and TB in India The project, involving researchers from Queen Mary, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Chennai and pioneering Delhi-based startup, Magneto Cleantech, will create revolutionary, air filtration technologies that use Ultraviolet C (UVC), a type of radiation known to be very effective at ‘killing’, or … [more]

Congratulations to Mingyang Wang for passing his PhD viva The PhD student Mingyang Wang successfully defended his PhD project title “Hydrodynamics and Suspended Sediment Transport in Partially vegetated Channel Flows” subject to style corrections on July 19th. Mingyang has already published three journal papers in the Journal of Hydrology, Advances in Water Resources and Computational Particle mechanics … [more]

Science & Engineering Summer Research Internships for BAME Undergraduate Students in SEMS As part of the Science & Engineering Faculty’s mission to transfer horizons for all students, the School Management Team are delighted to report that SEMS have won four S&E Summer Research Internships for BAME Undergraduate Students. Following a rigorous selection process examining the quality of the … [more]

"Mitigating and harnessing sound for renewables and power generation", a talk will be given on Dr Avital group's research in this field as part of the UK Acoustics Network seminar programme. We will look at several cases studies spanning from high to low intensity sound applications for energy engineering and sound-structure interaction. The first case is the high speed jet noise, where focus will be given to crackle noise which appears in supersonic jets but difficult to capture using power spectrum … [more]

Special Issue "Fluid Dynamics of Renewable Energy" A special issue in the Journal Fluids has been commissioned on Fluid Dynamics of Renewable Energy and is edited by Dr Avital and Prof Ji. Accepted papers will be offered 50% discount. Further details are on https://www.mdpi.com/journal/fluids/special_issues/Fluid_Renewable_Energy [more]

Researchers develop new smell test for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and COVID-19 A new smell test developed by Queen Mary University of London researchers has been found to be easy to use in patients with Parkinson’s disease, and could also be helpful in diagnosing COVID-19 in the broader population. Smell tests have the potential to support the diagnosis of certain … [more]

Karthikeyan Ponniah is awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) Leaders Scholarship Well done to my former tutee, Karthikeyan Ponniah, who has been awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) Leaders Scholarship. Karthikeyan is 1 of 30 candidates, who have received this award in this round. Recipients of this RAE award “will get the opportunity to acquire the skills needed to fulfil their … [more]

YouTube video on Prof Knight's paper on the urine stream set to go viral Steve Mould, the famous science communicator and YouTuber, has just produced a new video on the physics behind the shape of the urine stream. Steve explains that there is very little published literature on this phenomenum but he describes one key paper ... ... In 2012 Prof Knight and colleagues published a paper … [more]

Surface treatments for next generation quiet aerofoils The team of engineers from Queen Mary has won significant funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) devoted to high-resolution modelling and simulation of aerofoil noise. In the new £405,916 research project, Prof. Karabasov and his team will work in collaboration with the Institute of Sound and … [more]

Fan Li Passes his PhD Viva on "Non-equilibrium and hybrid multiscale modelling of molecular systems" Many congratulations to Fan Li for successfully passing his PhD Viva with minor corrections on the dissertation “Non-equilibrium and hybrid multiscale modelling of molecular systems”. The Viva was held remotely by Teams. Many problems in science and engineering comprise multiple scales in space and time. A particular example … [more]

Salvatore Auriemma Passes his PhD Viva Salvatore Auriemma has passed his PhD viva on "Development of parametric CAD models for gradient-based aerodynamic shape optimisation" with minor corrections. Gradient-based methods are the most efficient approach for soptimisation with very many design variables and has become a standard in aerodynamic shape optimisation of e.g. aircraft wings and … [more]

Queen Mary Confirms Position Among World's Best Universities QMUL has climbed twelve places up the QS 2021 World University Rankings, published on Wednesday 10 June, to confirm its position as one of the world’s top universities. The University placed 114th in the world and remains in the top 20 in the UK. The Complete University Guide for 2021 was also released … [more]

Rejish Jesudasan successfully defends his thesis Rejish Jesudasan successfully defended his thesis on "An Adaptive Parametrisation Method for Shape Optimisation Using Adjoint Sensitivities". Owing to COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2, the viva was conducted over video conferencing, but even with noise of his ceiling fan (essential in his Indian home at this time), the finer details of his algorithm … [more]

Vasily Gryazev has successfully defended PhD Viva Congratulations to Vasily Gryazev who has successfully passed his PhD viva subject to the usual minor corrections on the dissertation devoted to hot jet noise modelling. Because of COVID19 the viva was held remotely via Teams. Well done -- Vasily! [more]

International workshop "Advanced numerical methods for solving evolutionary problems", 14 April 2020 The workshop is organised by the Institute of Numerical Mathematics, Russian Academy of Sciences in the framework of the International Mathematical Centre "Moscow Centre for Fundamental and Applied Mathematics, 8 Gubkin Street, Moscow, Russia, 117333. Organisation Committee: Professor Yuri Vassilevski, Associate Director of Institute of Numerical Mathematics and Corresponding member of the … [more]

PGR Supervisor of the Year Sergey Karabasov has been shortlisted as PGR Supervisor of the Year to attend the Education Awards ceremony on Monday 23rd March where the winners will be announced. The event will take place at Drapers’ Hall, Throgmorton Ave, London EC2N 2DQ. https://www.qmsu.org/awards/education/teaching/ [more]

Another Hugely Successful ILF Completed The School of Engineering and Materials Science hosted another successful Industrial Liaison Forum (ILF) on Wednesday 26th February 2020 which attracted 85 visitors during the day. The focus was on our Taught Programme Student Projects with more than 100 of our students having the opportunity to discuss their projects with each other, QMUL … [more]

Robot Hand Team Wins Top Prize at ILF A team of 4th year MEng students Jamie SENGUN, Ahmed DEIRI, Talha TAILOR, Kai PAGE & Mohammed KHAN who have been working on the "Soft 3D-printed Robotic Hand" project supervised by Dr Lorenzo Jamone & Dr Ketao Zhang won the best MEng group project prize at the Annual SEMS taught student Industrial … [more]

Land Speed Record Attempt in Bolivia The findings of our former Aerospace MEng students (Salah Macan Markar, Karan Sumaria, Tanjir Zaman and Banjoab Kantangul) will be incorporated in the future Land Speed Record Streamliner by CMR Motorsport Challenges. The work has been carried out as part of their MEng project entitled "Land Speed Record Aerodynamics Design … [more]

Queen Mary’s Aerospace Engineering Students Flying Again A group of our third year Aerospace engineering students recently took a short flight test course as part of our annual visit to Cranfield University. The course demonstrated performance and handling qualities of a real aircraft flight. They flew on a British Aerospace Jetstream Aircraft Series 31 turbo-prop, taking the role … [more]

Decrease Jet-Installation Noise The new H2020 project "Decrease Jet-Installation Noise" devoted to modelling and reduction of jet-wing-interaction noise typical of large commercial turbo-fan engines will be funded by the European Commission. The project is led by Rolls-Royce and Airbus and includes leading organisations in Europe and the UK and is for 3 years. Our … [more]

Siamak Akbarzadeh successfully defends PhD thesis Siamak Akbarzadeh successfully defended his thesis on using Automatic Differentiation software tools to obtain adjoint variants of the incompressible SIMPLE scheme. Adjoint methods are essential for numerical optimisation of many-parameter systems with expensive models, such as CFD. Siamak's work is a step forward in deriving robust adjoints for the widely … [more]

Industrial Liaison Forum is a Tremendous Success The biannual Industrial Liaison Forum was held on Wednesday November 20th November in the Octagon. The event was well attended with over eighty industrialists from more than sixty organisations attending. The event was broken up into four parts, starting in the morning with the PhD research poster exhibition, followed by … [more]

Award Winning Research Students in SEMS At the SEMS annual research led Industrial Liaison Forum, there was a research showcase from 80 of our current PhD students. The panel of judges this year were made up a wide range of academics from each division. They decided after a careful deliberation to award the following prizes: 1st Prize: … [more]

Orest Mykhaskiv defends thesis Orest Mykhaskiv has successfully defended his PhD on gradient-based shape optimisation. His thesis significantly advanced the field by including the geometric CAD model description inside the design loop. This breakthrough allows to integrate effective gradient-based optimisation seamlessly into industrial design workflows. Orests PhD was funded by the European Commission through … [more]

4500 Reads Researchgate has tallied up 4500 reads for the papers of the group. Many thanks to my co-authors, well done all!

Frontiers of aeroacoustics research: theory, computation and experiment The Philosophical Transactions A issue on “Frontiers of aeroacoustics research: theory, computation and experiment” will be available online on 14 October 2019. Aeroacoustics studies noise generated by aerodynamic flows. Founded on fluid mechanics and applied mathematics, and relying increasingly upon computational modelling, aeroacoustics has grown into a discipline with its own key … [more]

Invited talk at the Ann Dowling Symposium Dr Sergey Karabasov gave an invited talk at the Ann Dowling Symposium, Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The Symposium was in honour of exceptional achievements and contributions over the long and illustrious career of Professor Dame Ann Dowling FRS. [more]

Professor Wen Wang elected FREng Professor Wen Wang has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering today. This is as: Wen Wang is distinguished for his insightful achievements in cardiovascular bioengineering, specifically in biofluid mechanics related to the molecular lining of blood vessels and the transport of fluid and solutes across the … [more]

The Sir James Lighthill Best Student Paper Award won by Vasily Gryazev Congratulations to Vasily Gryazev whose paper on the modelling of noise propagation in heated jets won the Sir James Lighthill Best Student Paper Award at the 26th International Congress on Sound and Vibration (ICSV26). The award is for the best paper published in the Proceedings of IIAV Annual International Congress … [more]

Aerospace Engineering students attend extreme flight course Third year undergraduate aerospace students attended an extreme flight course in Cranfield in June. The course allows students to experience when things go wrong in a flight, how to correct them as well as different modes of flight . Students were flown in a fully-instrumented Jetstream 31 aircraft, experiencing flight modes as … [more]

Making a splash is all in the angle Making a splash depends on the angle of a liquid as it hits and moves along a surface, according to a new study from Queen Mary University of London. If a droplet hits a dry solid surface fast enough it will splash and being able to predict a splash is … [more]

Funding Awarded To Develop a Simulation Tool For Airside Operations Incorporating Intelligent/Autonomous Taxiing Two Queen Mary researchers have been awarded further funding to develop a simulation tool to quantify the savings of fuel burn and time of taxiing aircraft by integrating more advanced and automated decision support systems. Dr Jun Chen and Dr Michal Weiszer, from the School of Engineering and Materials Science, … [more]

Technology to capture energy from sea waves awarded funding A team from Queen Mary has been awarded funding to develop technology to capture energy from waves at sea. Wave Energy Scotland (WES) will grant £461,345 to the team from the School of Engineering and Materials Science to develop an adaptive hierarchical model predictive control framework for wave energy converters (WECs). … [more]

100 reads on Researchgate for paper on gradient-enabled CAD systems Our groundbreaking paper Algorithmic differentiation of the Open CASCADE Technology CAD kernel and its coupling with an adjoint CFD solver the first to differentiate a full CAD system and a breakthrough for gradient-based optimisation with CAD-based parametrisations has achieved 100 reads on researchgate. Jens. [more]

Bike Design Team Wins Top Prize A team of 4th year students: Arya LI, Bijoy DAS, Lydia DENTON & Yue MENG, who have been working on project to design a totally new road bike have won the top prize at the 2019 Industrial Liaison Forum. The students, supervised by Dr. Emiliano Bilotti and Dr. Han Zhang, presented their … [more]

Successful PhD examination Pavanakumar Mohanamuraly successfully defended his thesis on "Fast Adjoint-assisted Multilevel Multifidelity Method for Uncertainty Quantification of the Aleatoric Kind" His work uses Monte-Carlo methods to compute the effect of uncertainties due to manufacturing. Current methods work well for up to handful of uncertain parameters, but their computation cost increases dramatically … [more]

Paper published in Optimization Methods and Software The paper by P. Mohanamuraly (QMUL), L. Hascoet (INRIA, France) and J.-D. Mueller (QMUL) on Seeding and adjoining zero-halo partitioned parallel scientific codes has been accepted for publication. The paper resolves the important issue of how to initialise the computation of a gradient with modern Automatic Differentiation software tools … [more]

50 reads for NURBS paper Researchgate says: 50 reads for this paper. Such reads are the first steps to get cited, it is very important to make pre-prints available online. All the best, Jens. Adjoint-Based Aerodynamic Optimisation of Wing Shape Using Non-uniform Rational B-Splines September 2019 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-89890-2_10 In book: Evolutionary and Deterministic Methods … [more]

EUR225K Grant Funding Success The EU has agreed provide EUR225,000 to fund the KAFKA project: "Efficient Computational Methods for Active Flow Control Using Adjoint Sensitivities" Active flow control aims to change the character of the flow by suction, blowing or pulsating jets. Such jets may e.g. be able to replace bulky car spoilers … [more]

Visit by Prof. Xu, NWPU Prof. Shenren Xu of NPWU has visited QMUL to discuss continued collaboration around the the open-source STAMPS code that originates from Jens' group.

Jens-Dominik Mueller presents at the Sorbonne Dr. Jens-Dominik Mueller gave an invited presentation on "Shape optimisation using AD of complete CFD workflows, including CAD geometry" at the "Algorithmic Differentiation Workshop" organised by the Institut du Physique du Globe of the Sorbonne University, Paris. [more]

Airbus funds PhD project on shape optimisation of winglets Airbus UK is a partner for a 3.5y CASE studentship with J.-D. Mueller's fluid optimisation group. The PhD project for Gordon Lindsay will apply our CAD-based gradient-enabled shape parametrisation tools to perform multi-disciplinary shape optimisation of winglets. [more]

CAD optimisation papear cited 30 times Researchgate says, our paper CAD-based shape optimisation with CFD using a discrete adjoint Xu, Jahn, Mueller is now cited 30 times. I'd encourage all to post your preprints on ResearchGate, this is important for dissemination and being cited. All the best, Jens. [more]

Published paper Paper published in Desalination, impact factor 6.6: Sensitivity analysis and gradient-based optimisation of feed spacer shape in reverse osmosis membrane processes using discrete adjoint approach YangWang, Wei He, Jens-DominikMüller Desalination, 2019, Volume 449, Pages 26-40 Well done to Yang and Wei. Jens. [more]

Designing a better raincoat Work lead by Lorenzo Botto and Rafael Castrejón-Pita has been featured in a piece on Physics Today. Water-repellent clothing is designed to keep water droplets out while letting humidity escape.Hydrophobic fabric meets both requirements, but in striking a balance between them, it fails to repel water completely. When … [more]

Presentation at VKI Lecture series Jens-Dominik Mueller was invited to present at the Von Karman Institute Lecture Series on "Introduction to Optimization and Multi-disciplinary Design", September 10-14, 2018, in Brussels. The von Karman Institute organizes each year 8 to 12 one-week Lecture Series on specialized topics in the field of aerodynamics, fluid mechanics and heat transfer with application … [more]

Jens-Dominik Mueller teaches adjoint methods at Cambridge Summer School Jens gave a 3-day Summer School, "An introduction to gradient-based optimisation, adjoint methods and Automatic Differentiation", organised by the Special Interest Group on Numerical Optimisation with Fluids at Cambridge, 8-10 August 2018. 20 students from the UK and the EU attended. The SIG is offering the training material at http://signumopt.sems.… [more]

Queen Mary project to reduce aircraft noise awarded funding A new project led by engineers at Queen Mary University of London that aims to reduce aircraft noise has won significant funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The £422,275 EPSRC grant will fund the Jet Installation Noise Abatement (JINA) project, which will bring together expertise in experimental … [more]

Institute of Mechanical Engineers confirms accreditation of SEMS programmes The Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) has confirmed the accreditation details for our programmes following their re-accreditation visit to SEMS in November. Students completing an IMechE accredited degree are deemed to have met part or all of the academic requirements for registration as a Chartered or Incorporated Engineer and are … [more]

SEMS Industrial Liaison Forum is a Great Success The Spring SEMS Industrial Liaison Forum was a very popular event again this year. In the morning the annual taught student showcase took place in the Octagon which was followed in the afternoon by a wide range of alumni lead panel and networking sessions. There was also an Industrial Advisory … [more]

PhD success for SEMS student Zhen Congratulations to Zhen Wang who has recently passed his PhD viva, with a thesis entitled Motion of Deformable Capsules in Complex Flows. Zhen has published one paper in the Physical Review E and another in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and won a travel grant at the IUTAM2016 conference. Zhen … [more]