AE Seminar
Gregory W. Reich
Director, Multidisciplinary Science & Technology Center | Air Force Research Laboratory
"Bio-inspired Reconfigurable System Design via Effectiveness Based Topology Optimization"
Monday, May 4
3:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Price Gilbert 1280 - Scholars Event Theater
About the Seminar:
A morphing system’s performance is heavily affected by its physical design, manufacturing considerations and how it is operated. This project explores how these factors can be accounted for when using bio-inspired strategies to optimize the topology of a morphing wing’s airfoil. An L-system based approach is used to define the design variables that construct a graph based topology representing the airfoil’s internal structure and actuators, allowing for a wide range of airfoil designs to be considered. The discrepancies due to additive manufacturing limitations between the simulated and actual behavior of airfoils represented using graph based topologies are explored. Several objectives measuring how well a morphing wing aircraft can fly a trajectory are used to optimize an airfoil’s topology for effectiveness. These objectives include tracking performance on individual trajectories, tracking performance on worst case trajectories and the minimum flight times needed to reach pre-specified flight states. Results compare how well topologies optimized for these different objectives perform relative to each other.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Reich is currently the Director of the Multidisciplinary Science & Technology Center (MSTC) in the Aerospace Systems Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory. He leads a team of approximately 50 government and contract researchers in fundamental and applied research in multi-fidelity design of aircraft systems, focusing on the use of system Measures of Effectiveness as objectives in the multidisciplinary analysis, design, and optimization process. Dr. Reich received a Bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech in 1992, a Master's degree from MIT in 1994, and a PhD from the University of Colorado in 2000, all in Aerospace Engineering. He is a Fellow of AIAA, AFRL, and ASME, and has chaired the Gordon Research Conference on Multifunctional Materials & Structures, the AIAA Adaptive Structures Conference, and the SPIE Smart Structures & NDE Conference. He served as chair of the AIAA Adaptive Structures Technical Committee and as an Associate Editor of Journal of Intelligent Material Systems & Structures.