MechE Seminar Series: Shabnam Raayai-Ardakani

Speaker:Shabnam Raayai-Ardakani

Title:Drag control techniques for advanced air mobility

Abstract:Transportation industry accounts for close to one-quarter of the total worldwide CO2 emissions. While ground transportation shows a large potential for electrification and decarbonization, aviation, shipping, and trucking are deemed the most difficult to decarbonize. Electric aircraft and advanced air mobility are transforming the aviation industry, paving the path for sustainability of the industry. But the low energy density of the on-board batteries has limited the range of these vehicles. Drag control technologies, as a means for reducing fuel consumption, have the potential to increase the range of electric manned and unmanned vehicles. In this talk, I will focus on two drag reduction techniques, use of streamwise riblets, and formations of vehicles. I will discuss how these approaches impact the case of vehicles with small-sized bodies and explore the effect of geometry on the mechanics of these drag reduction techniques.

About the Speaker:Shabnam Raayai-Ardakani is a Rowland Fellow and Principal Investigator at Rowland Institute at Harvard, and an instructor in the school of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral associate at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. She received her master’s and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and won the Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in fluid dynamics from the American Physical Society.