THE SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT
Canada's leading institute for aerospace and robotics research and education
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Graduate programs
We provide access to world class computing resources, major research centres, and multi-institutional networks to take your engineering discipline to the next level.
Faculty spotlight
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Professor P. Grant
Research Focus
- Developing aircraft safety vehicle simulation to determine human motion perception at time of crisis
- Flight dynamics, flight simulation, the virtual flight test facility, and human control of vehicles
Current Projects
- Development of ground-based simulators for upset prevention and recovery training (UPRT) in collaboration with the FAA
- The impact of structural flexibility on aircraft handling qualities and modeling of human motion perception and control
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Professor C.J. Damaren
Research Focus
- Dynamics and control of spacecraft including orbital, attitude and structural motions of these systems
- Control system design for large structurally flexible robot manipulator systems
Current Projects
- Developing control systems for Solar Sails that use solar radiation pressure as a source of propulsion
- Applying previous research on attitude control using torques produced by Earth’s magnetic fields to structurally flexible spacecraft
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Professor J.W. Davis
Research Focus
- Study of plasma-materials interactions with ITER-specific materials: carbon, tungsten and beryllium
- Candidate reactor materials are tested using plasma simulation facilities to study plasma-materials-interaction processes
Current Projects
- Studying (i) materials erosion, (ii) diffusion, trapping, and retention of hydrogen isotopes in carbon, tungsten, and mixed materials, (iii) the recovery of deuterium from layers of D-containing deposits formed in tokamaks
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Professor A. Ekmekci
Research Focus
- Flow-induced noise and vibration, aeroacoustics, flow control, unsteady separated flows, vortex dynamics, and flow-structure interactions
Current Projects
- Collaborating with Bombardier on several projects related to aircraft noise and its mitigation, including aerodynamic and aeroacoustic investigations of landing gears, high lift devices, and resonating cavities experienced by exhaust ducts of various critical aircraft systems
- Collaborating with Safran Landing Gears on landing gear noise and its mitigation
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Professor R. Emami
Research Focus
- Development of systematic frameworks and architectures for concurrent, detail-level engineering of aerospace systems
- Robust learning mechanisms for autonomous, heterogeneous robot teams for ground and space missions
- Asteroid Engineering: discovery, characterization, exploration and prospecting of near-Earth asteroids
Current Projects
- Space systems miniaturization
- Space debris removal
- Asteroid redirection
- Satellite formation
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Professor Ö.L. Gülder
Research Focus
- Improving the understanding of the combustion process to convert chemical energy to thermal energy or propulsive force
- Paving the way for more efficient and environmentally friendly combustion of both traditional and alternative fuels
Current Projects
- Soot aerosol formation in high pressure combustion
- Low-emission combustor technologies for high-efficiency compact aviation gas turbine engines
- Thermal oxidative and pyrolytic stability of aviation jet fuels
- Turbulent premixed flame dynamics
- Soot formation in turbulent non-premixed combustion
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Professor P. Lavoie
Research Focus
- Study of transitional and turbulent flows, including flow structures and instabilities associated with these phenomena
- Investigating the fundamental dynamics of attached and separated shear layers and how these can be manipulated to improve flow characteristics
Current Projects
- Collaboration with Bombardier to investigate different sources of airframe noise and how these can be mitigated
- Active control of turbulent boundary layers in order to reduce skin friction drag
- Study of unsteady aerodynamic effects due to gusts and sudden maneuvers for application to unmanned aerial vehicles
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Professor H.T. Liu
Research Focus
- To design innovative dynamics and control solutions to improve aerial systems performance
- To develop transformative flight technologies for better aviation
Current Projects
- Designing fault tolerant control techniques for flexible aircraft
- Designing a novel amphibian UAV for commercial and scientific missions, e.g. water assessment, wildfire monitoring
- Investigating formation flight of large number of UAVs
- Studying swarming robotic drones in cooperative hunting
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Professor P. Nair
Research Focus
- Development of scalable algorithms for probabilistic data-driven and physics-based predictive modeling and robust optimization of complex systems
Current Projects
- Ongoing projects include scalable Bayesian learning algorithms, robust optimization, numerical methods for stochastic partial differential equations, and low-rank tensor decomposition schemes for high-dimensional problems
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Professor J. Kelly
Research Focus
- Creating robust autonomous systems that are able to operate independently over long durations in challenging environments on Earth and in Space
- Designing and developing collaborative robots (cobots) which are intended to operate in human-centred, shared workspaces
Current Projects
- Energy-aware traverse planning for planetary rovers
- Deep learning for accurate, long-term visual localization
- Collaborative mobile manipulation in dynamic, uncertain environments
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Professor S.L. Waslander
Research Focus
- Simultaneous localization and mapping with dynamic camera clusters, and perception for autonomous driving
- Uncertainty estimation for deep neural networks using classical and learning approaches to improve perception
Current Projects
- Developing active vision techniques that allow robotic platforms to improve robustness through targeted sensor data acquisition
- Public road driving experiments of a fully functional autonomous vehicle for demonstrating state-of-the-art perception and planning methods in real-time on in-vehicle hardware
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Professor M. Yano
Research Focus
- Numerical methods, scientific computation, and numerical analysis for partial differential equations in continuum mechanics
- Improving reliability, efficiency, and autonomy of numerical simulations
Current Projects
- Development of error estimation and adaptation techniques for higher-fidelity simulations
- Development of model reduction techniques for many-query scenarios arising in parametric studies and uncertainty quantification
- Development of mathematical frameworks to combine experimental data and simulation
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Professor D.W. Zingg
Research Focus
- To advance the state of the art in algorithms for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as well as aerodynamic shape optimization and aerostructural optimization
- To apply these algorithms to the development of drag reduction techniques and the next generation of aircraft with greatly reduced greenhouse gas emissions per passenger-km
Current Projects
- Investigation of unconventional aircraft configurations, such as the hybrid wing-body and the truss-braced wing through aerodynamic shape optimization and multidisciplinary design optimization
- Development of novel high-order summation-by-parts operators applicable to unstructured meshes, including entropy-stable schemes
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Professor S. Chaudhuri
Research Focus
- Developing hydrogen-based power and propulsion systems by understanding fundamental mechanisms of turbulent reacting flows
- Turbulence – transport – chemistry interaction in contrails and in exhaled aerosols
Current Projects
- Micromix based hydrogen combustion for gas turbine engines. Partners: Siemens, NRC, UPoly-M, McGill
- Flame speeds of turbulent, lean hydrogen-air flames
- Combustion dynamics of hydrogen-air flames: Partner: NRC
- Self-decarbonizing combustor