Description

Postponed
Space Tech and Artificial Intelligence

Featuring:
Luca Maddalena, PhD, Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Aerodynamics Research Center, UT Arlington


Dr. Luca Maddalena is responsible for research operations in its low-speed wind tunnel, transonic Ludwieg tube tunnel (0.4< M <1.25), supersonic blow-down tunnel (1.5< M <4), detonation-driven shock tunnel (6< M <16), and the 1.6 MW arc jet facility, as well as pulsed and continuous detonation wave engine test cells. His research, primarily experimental, focuses on fundamental investigations of mixing and combustion in turbulent supersonic flows, and their application to hypersonic airbreathing propulsion, and on reusable thermal protection systems and thermal management for sustained hypersonic flight. His work has been funded by NASA LaRC (Hypervelocity Propulsion, Mach 8+), the Office of Naval Research for his contribution to the Strike WEApon Program (SWEAP) and Arc-Jet Flow Characterization, the Joint Hypersonics Transition Office (JHTO) on directed energy radiation for hypersonic applications, the Department of Energy on cold plasma, the Air Force Research Laboratory on the Next Generation Thermal Protection Systems Program, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Prof. Maddalena is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He served as Chair of the AIAA's Hypersonic Technologies and Aerospace Planes (HyTASP) Technical Committee from 2017 to 2019 and presently serves as Deputy Director for Aircraft Technologies within the AIAA's Aircraft Technology, Integration and Operations (ATIO) Group. Prof. Luca Maddalena has received his laurea degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, and his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Virginia Tech. Prior to joining the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) faculty, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT).