A technical paper co-authored by AE Regents Professor Dimitri Mavris, his former doctoral student, Peter Suh, and  NASA researcher Alexander Chin has been chosen as the best Atmospheric Flight Mechanics Paper for 2014 by the AIAA Atmospheric Flight Mechanics Conference.

Announcement of the award came on January 6, during AIAA's SciTech 2015 Conference, held in Kissimee, Florida.

Mavris and his co-authors, both researchers at NASA Dryden Flight Center, were recognized for their paper, “Robust Modal Filtering and Control of the X-56A Model with Simulated Fiber Optic Sensor Failures."

"This is the second paper that has been generated by Dr. Suh's dissertation at Georgia Tech," said Mavris of his co-author's work. "The previous paper, 'Virtual Deformation Control of the X-56A Model with Simulated Fiber Optic Sensors' received this same honor last year, so it's two for two."

The trio's most recent paper looks at their work to improve the stability of remotely piloted aircraft, in particular the X-56A, using an estimator that, in simulated scenarios, has rejected 230 worst-case fiber optic sensor failures.

"This paper addressed the question of feasibility of active control of wing shape and body freedom flutter using advanced distributed high spatial resolution fiber optic sensors - while accounting for sensor failures," said Mavris during a break from the five-day conference.

"This paper provides an important computational simulation study of the practicality of using distributed strain sensing in an aeroservoelastic control system, which can support lighter more flexible aircraft, thereby enabling next generation aircraft weight savings and ultimately improved fuel efficiency. The methodology proposed was applied on NASA’s X-56 simulation model with good success and the hope now is that it will be used directly in NASA’s upcoming X-56A flexible motion control flights."

Dimitri Mavris is the Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysisand the  the director of the GT-AE Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL). His primary areas of research interest include: advanced design methods, aircraft conceptual and preliminary design, air-breathing propulsion design, multi-disciplinary analysis, design and optimization, system of systems, and non-deterministic design theory.