Research

LA fire rebuilding recommendations for homeowners

Susan Glairon — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 21:14:03 +0000

LA fire rebuilding recommendations for homeowners Susan Glairon Tue, 04/01/2025 - 15:14

Researchers from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering share key lessons from post-Marshall Fire rebuilding to help Los Angeles homeowners and others navigate recovery after wildfires.

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Aircrafts of the future: Boosting aerodynamic performance by engineered surface vibrations

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:34:49 +0000

Aircrafts of the future: Boosting aerodynamic performance by engineered surface vibrations Jeff Zehnder Mon, 03/24/2025 - 10:34

Jeff Zehnder

“This is probably the most radical conceptual advancement for airplanes since the replacement of propellers with jets.” – M.I. Hussein

Mahmoud Hussein is not pulling punches about the potential impact of a major aerospace materials research project.

As the principal investigator of a $7.5 million, five-year Department of Defense Office of Naval Research (ONR) Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), Hussein is leading an effort to reshape the fundamental character of fluid-structure interactions to reduce drag on high-speed aerospace vehicles—the focus of the project.

“Since the dawn of aviation, aircraft design has been based on the premise of shaping the surface of the vehicle to create lift and minimize drag. Our team is pursuing a new paradigm where the phononic properties, or intrinsic vibrations, of a surface or subsurface provide an additional pathway to interact with the airflow, to enhance the vehicle performance in an unprecedented manner,” said Hussein, the Alvah and Harriet Hovlid Professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ��.

Hussein also has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Physics and an affiliation with the Materials Science and Engineering Program.

MURI Partners

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Mahmoud I. Hussein
Professor & Principal Investigator
Armin Kianfar
Post-Doctoral Associate
Adam Harris
PhD Student

University of Maryland

Christoph Brehm
Associate Professor

Johns Hopkins University

Kevin Hemker
Professor

Purdue University

Joseph Jewell
Associate Professor

Applied Physics Laboratory

Keith Caruso
Principal Staff Engineer
Ken Kane
Researcher

University of Kentucky

Alexandre Martin
Professor

Case Western Reserve University

Bryan Schmidt
Assistant Professor

Office of Naval Research (Program Directors)

Eric Marineau
Eric Wuchina

Phononic Subsurfaces

Turbulent airflow is detrimental to the fuel economy and the surface temperature of aircrafts as they soar through the atmosphere. This research aims to mitigate the transition to turbulence using phononic subsurfaces (PSubs) – synthetic designed materials affixed beneath the surface of a wing or vehicle body that passively manipulate small-amplitude vibrations, and by extension flow fluctuations, point-by-point along the surface.

Turbulence and Fuel Economy

Passenger planes consume over 10,000 gallons of jet fuel on a single cross-country trip, so improvements in fuel economy could lead to big savings for airlines. The potential in hypersonic crafts is even more dramatic.

Hypersonic vehicles travel at velocities at least five times the speed of sound. The turbulence that results from such speeds causes the surface of the vehicles to heat up to thousands of degrees, requiring they be constructed of exotic, expensive materials.

“By introducing a phononic subsurface to precisely shape the vibrations along the surface, we can alter the way the air interacts with the vehicle such that we ultimately don’t need to come up with exceedingly high-temperature-resistant materials,” Hussein said. “We’re passively manipulating instabilities in air flow in a manner that is favorable in the boundary layer where the vehicle meets the surrounding air.”

2015 to Today

The concept of PSubs was discovered by Hussein. The work began from a collaboration over 15 years ago between Hussein and then �� Professor Sedat Biringen, who died in 2020. As leaders in the newly-born research area of phononics and the longstanding field of fluid dynamics, respectively, they worked together to theoretically demonstrate–for the first time–a way to manipulate phonons to improve the efficiency of flight, with tremendous potential for the aerospace industry and prospects for application to water vessels as well.

Recently Hussein gathered a team of experts from across the country to take the concept of PSubs to the next level with this hypersonics MURI grant. Over the duration of the project, the group will develop high-fidelity models and fabricate functional prototypes to effectively characterize and demonstrate the technology in high-speed wind tunnels.

“We’re most confident about this endeavor, because the idea is rooted in fundamental science marrying–in quite a sophisticated fashion–fluid dynamics with condensed matter physics as well as with the emerging field of elastic metamaterials,” Hussein said.

“This is probably the most radical conceptual advancement for airplanes since the replacement of propellers with jets.” – Mahmoud Hussein is not pulling punches about the potential impact of a major aerospace materials research project.

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Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:29:48 +0000

Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research Jeff Zehnder Thu, 03/13/2025 - 12:29

Jeff Zehnder

Alireza Doostan is leading a major effort for real-time data compression for supercomputer research.

A professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the ��, Doostan is the principal investigator on a $1.2 million Department of Energy project to change how researchers handle the massive amounts of data that result from complex physics problems like modeling turbulence and aerodynamics for air and space craft.

Compressing data is nothing new when it comes to computing, but advances in high- performance systems are now creating so much data that it becomes impossible to store for later analysis.

“Computing power has increased drastically, but moving and storing that data is becoming a bottleneck. We have to reduce the size of the data generated through large scale simulation codes,” Doostan said.

While some scientific analysis of turbulence flows can be completed faster on ever larger high-performance computing platforms, much of the information must be discarded because the scope of the data is too vast to store, making it impossible to conduct later assessments.

“There is a lot of structure and physics embedded in the data that ideally needs to be preserved to study complex flow physics or develop faster models,” Doostan said.

The goal of the grant is to both maintain accuracy of modeling data while decreasing its complexity, and critically, allowing it to be stored by compressing it in-situ, or in real-time as it is created during modeling. This is not currently possible for large-scale models, as existing technology often requires some or the entire modeling simulation be completed before compression can begin.

Joining Doostan on the project is a team of �� faculty, including Ken Jansen and John Evans, both also from Smead Aerospace, and Stephen Becker from applied math.

The team is focused on development of both traditional and deep neural models for massively parallel implementation of novel linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques. It is a major undertaking, bringing together researchers with a broad range of backgrounds, including computational physics and sciences, discretization, machine learning, linear algebra, and statistics.

“This is a very interdisciplinary problem,” Doostan said. “This is not a problem one person can solve. You need a team.”

For Jansen, whose research focuses on turbulence modeling, an advance in compression could lead to significant progress across the spectrum of high-performance computing.

“This data compression research is critically important to provide access to the dynamics of our simulations,” Jansen said. “As simulations have passed petascale and are now exascale, it has become impractical to write the full solution fields to disk at a sufficient frequency and count, owing to the broad range of spatial and temporal scales of turbulence.”

The group has completed soon-to-be-published research showing strong promise for their approach. They are now working to scale up their algorithms to work at scale on supercomputing platforms like ��’s Blanca cluster as well as Department of Energy systems.

“There is still a lot to be done, but our early work has shown success and only increases the computational load by less than five percent,” Doostan said.

The three-year award runs through fall 2027. Doostan is hopeful their final product will include publicly available next-generation compression software for general use by all simulation practitioners.

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Tamara Lehman receives CAREER award to strengthen hardware security

Charles Ferrer — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:12:05 +0000

Tamara Lehman receives CAREER award to strengthen hardware security Charles Ferrer Wed, 03/12/2025 - 08:12

Tamara Lehman, assistant professor of computer engineering, has earned a CAREER award through the National Science Foundation to address hardware vulnerabilities in microarchitecture designs while exploring security metrics for future hardware designs.

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New technology turns waste heat into electricity, defies physical limit

Alexander James Servantez — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 18:46:47 +0000

New technology turns waste heat into electricity, defies physical limit Alexander Jame… Tue, 02/18/2025 - 11:46

Assistant Professor Longji Cui and his team in the Cui Research Group have developed a new technology to turn thermal radiation into electricity in a way that literally teases the basic law of thermal physics. The group says their research has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing industries by increasing power generation without the need for high temperature heat sources or expensive materials.

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Research program sparks student’s transfer to ��

Susan Glairon — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 23:51:32 +0000

Research program sparks student’s transfer to �� Susan Glairon Mon, 02/17/2025 - 16:51

Susan Glairon

After a summer in ��’s Young Scholars Summer Research Program (YSSRP), Kate Lamb was inspired to change her path, transferring from community college to ��’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering as a biological engineering major.

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Diamond in the rough: Research could help better detect, target cancer cells

Alexander James Servantez — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 16:57:05 +0000

Diamond in the rough: Research could help better detect, target cancer cells Alexander Jame… Fri, 02/14/2025 - 09:57

Associate Professor Xiaoyun Ding and his team in the Biomedical Microfluidics Laboratory (BMMLab) stumbled across an interesting anomaly during a cell sensing project that used different forms of acoustic waves to measure cell mechanics. The group discovered a new wave mode never seen before that can unlock a new level of cell manipulation capabilities.

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CU Engineering announces inaugural Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fellows

Caroline Harrah — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 21:30:37 +0000

CU Engineering announces inaugural Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fellows Caroline Harrah Tue, 02/11/2025 - 14:30

Caroline Harrah

The ��’s College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) has announced the recipients of its inaugural class of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (I&E) Fellows, a new program designed to support faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students in advancing cutting-edge research with commercial potential. The fellowships are supported by the CEAS I&E initiative and Venture Partners at ��.

Assistant Professor, Longji Cui, Department of Mechanical Engineering (MCEN)

Launched in 2025, the fellowships include two tracks: the Faculty & Postdoc/Graduate Student Team Fellowships and the ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator Fellowships. Both are designed to foster a culture of entrepreneurship within the college by helping researchers translate academic discoveries into real-world impact.

“This inaugural cohort represents the remarkable breadth and depth of innovation within the College of Engineering and Applied Science,” said Wil Srubar, Deming associate dean for innovation and entrepreneurship. “By providing targeted support through these fellowship programs, we aim to empower researchers to transform their groundbreaking ideas into impactful solutions for society.”

Faculty & Postdoc /
Graduate Student Team Fellowships

The Faculty & Postdoc/Graduate Student Team Fellowships support collaborative teams of faculty members and graduate students or postdoctoral researchers. It provides funding, mentorship and access to entrepreneurial resources to help translate new technologies and innovations that have a strong commercialization potential.

Max Saffer-Meng, graduate student, and Assistant Professor Anthony Straub, Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE)

The inaugural recipients are:

Max Saffer-Meng, graduate student, and Assistant Professor Anthony Straub (Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering - CEAE)

William Franz, graduate student, and Professor Mark Borden (Department of Biomedical Engineering - BMEN)

Grace McFassel, postdoctoral researcher, and Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram (Department of Mechanical Engineering - MCEN)

Yunxuan Zhu, postdoctoral researcher, and Assistant Professor Longji Cui (Department of Mechanical Engineering - MCEN)

Maxwell Conway, graduate student, and Professor Nikolaus Correll (Department of Computer Science - CS)

Tsung-Han Wu, postdoctoral researcher, and Professor Scott Diddams (Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering - ECEE)

These interdisciplinary teams are commercializing several new technologies in areas such as advanced materials, robotics, biomedical devices and carbon capture.

Aoife Henry, graduate student, Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering (ECEE)

ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator Fellowships

The ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator Fellowships support individual researchers working on transformative technologies aimed at addressing complex societal challenges. Fellows receive funding and tailored entrepreneurial support through ��’s ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator to advance the development and commercialization of their innovations.

The first ASCENT Fellows are:

Sanghamitra Neogi, associate professor (Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences - AES)

Kian Lopez, graduate student (Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering - ChBE)

Aoife Henry, graduate student (Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering - ECEE)

Laila Fighera Marzall, research faculty (Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering - ECEE)

Jason Rivas, graduate student (Department of Materials Science and Engineering - MSE)

Dhiman Nandi, graduate student (Department of Chemistry)

Subrata Pal, graduate student (Department of Chemistry)

These fellows are advancing technologies in areas such as energy systems, advanced manufacturing and materials science.

Learn more about the CEAS Innovation & Entrepreneurship Fellowship programs.

CU Engineering has named the inaugural recipients of its Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fellows program, which supports faculty, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students in bringing research to market. The fellows, selected for their work in fields like robotics, biomedical devices and advanced materials, receive funding, mentorship and entrepreneurial support to accelerate commercialization.

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Tiny compasses could improve navigation, brain imaging and more

Alexander James Servantez — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 17:26:46 +0000

Tiny compasses could improve navigation, brain imaging and more Alexander Jame… Fri, 02/07/2025 - 10:26

Associate Research Professor Svenja Knappe is apart of a team of physicists and engineers studying quantum technology. In a novel study, the group has discovered a new way to measure the orientation of magnetic fields using atoms. Their findings could one day lead to the creation of new quantum sensors that can map the activity of the human brain or even help airplanes navigate the globe.

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ATLAS alum wins PECASE award for research on crisis informatics and disinformation

Emily Adams — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 17:26:30 +0000

ATLAS alum wins PECASE award for research on crisis informatics and disinformation Emily Adams Fri, 02/07/2025 - 10:26

Kate Starbird is now an associate professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering.

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Research

LA fire rebuilding recommendations for homeowners

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Aircrafts of the future: Boosting aerodynamic performance by engineered surface vibrations

MURI Partners

Phononic Subsurfaces

Turbulence and Fuel Economy

2015 to Today

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Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research

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Tamara Lehman receives CAREER award to strengthen hardware security

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​New technology turns waste heat into electricity, defies physical limit

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Research program sparks student’s transfer to ����������

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Diamond in the rough: Research could help better detect, target cancer cells

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CU Engineering announces inaugural Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fellows

Faculty & Postdoc / Graduate Student Team Fellowships

ASCENT Deep Tech Accelerator Fellowships

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