aerospace – Progress in Research

NABUCCO: revolutionary wings for sustainable aviation

Posted on 02/11/202306/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Aircraft capable of changing their shape during different flight conditions, addressing two of the most important challenges for the future of sustainable aviation: weight reduction and increased efficiency. These are the challenges of the NABUCCO research project by Professor Chiara Bisagni of the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology at Politecnico di Milano.

NABUCCO develops radically new concepts of adaptive composite structures, ie those capable of changing their shape, by exploiting the phenomenon of structural instability, to be applied to next-generation aircraft. In aeronautics, structural buckling is generally avoided as it can instantly generate large deformations and even cause a catastrophic collapse.

Conversely, NABUCCO no longer sees structural instability as a phenomenon to be avoided, but as a design opportunity to be explored for its revolutionary potential. The idea is to use the disadvantages of instability in a positive way to conceive, design and build composite structures – and in particular adaptive wings. Professor Chiara Bisagni will develop new design, analysis and optimisation methods based on analytical formulations, neural network algorithms and an integrated, multidisciplinary design approach.

Professor Bisagni was awarded the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for her NABUCCO project. These European funds enable internationally established researchers to conduct innovative, high-risk research projects by obtaining funding of up to 2.5 million euros for a duration of five years.

The Grant allowed Chiara Bisagni to return to Italy after more than 10 years abroad: first at the University of California San Diego in the United States and then at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Bisagni is also a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), an Executive Council Member of the International Committee on Composite Materials (ICCM) and a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy.

TRACES: higher education in the field of aviation safety

Posted on 07/02/202306/08/2024 by Erik Franco

In the European Aviation Safety Agency’s (EASA) 2019 annual report, in-flight icing was identified as a major problem for large aircraft.

Aircraft manufacturers must therefore demonstrate safe operation in freezing conditions before any new product is commissioned. This involves significant costs as the inherent complexity of freezing processes means that certification authorities place little trust in simulations and therefore require wind tunnel tests and flight tests to be carried out in freezing conditions.

TRACES (TRAining the next generation iCE researcherS) is a European joint doctoral network whose main objective is to train a group of experienced researchers in the field of in-flight icing, capable of mastering the different disciplines required to analyse the complexity of phenomena related to airframe icing and its mitigation in aircraft and aircraft engines.

Within TRACES, researchers will take part in various kinds of training activities: practical research activities, periods of work with non-academic partners and participation in scientific and additional soft skills courses and workshops.

The coordinator of TRACES is Alberto Guardone, professor at the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology of the Politecnico di Milano; 13 other universities and companies in the sector are members of the consortium.

The TRACES project website

PROJECT BENEFICIARIES

Politecnico di Milano
Technische Universitat Braunschweig – TUBS
Technische Universitat Darmstadt – TUDA
Office National d’Etudes et de Researches Aérospatiales – ONERA
École Polytechnique – ECPOL

INDUSTRY PARTNERS

Airbus Defence and Space Gmbh
Airbus Helicopters S.A.S.
Airbus Operation S.A.S.
Dassault Aviation
Eurac Research
General Electric Deutschland Holding Gmbh
Leonardo
Safran Aircraft Engines
Safran Aerotechnic

ADVISORY BOARD

EASA – European Aviation Safety Agency
FAA – Federal Aviation Administration
NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NRC – National Research Council
DLR – German Aerospace Center

LICIACube witnessed NASA/DART impact test with asteroid

Posted on 27/09/202206/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Along night time, September 26-27, the NASA DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft intentionally impacted, at almost 25000 km/h, the asteroid Dimorphos, the smaller body in the Didymos binary asteroid system.
DART represents the first attempt to experimentally verify the humanity capability to deflect potentially Earth-threatening asteroid by driving a space probe to crash into the celestial body at maximum relative speed to shift the natural body orbit.

A crucial role in the mission is played by LICIACube (Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids), the small spacecraft entirely Italian-made, which will go down in history as the first European CubeSat to fly in deep space, far from our protected terrestrial environment.

After being released by DART, last September 12, LICIACube flew by the asteroid few tens of km far, witnessing DART’s impact and avoiding the cloud of generated fragments, taking and recording images at the highest resolution possible, thanks to its two on-board cameras: the newly formed crater and the ejecta plume are targeted, supplying unique and fundamental data to scientists about the small celestial body features and the occurred impact dynamics.
The ASTRA research group researchers, led by professor Michèle Lavagna, Giovanni Zanotti, Michele Ceresoli and Andrea Capannolo from the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology gave a key contribution to this futuristic mission success.

During the past months, they hard worked in defining the LICIACube trajectory from the deployment until the asteroid flyby, while during the last weeks, after LICIA release from DART, they redesigned the crucial orbital manoeuvres to correct the CubeSat trajectory, exploiting the data sent on Earth by the small probe. Throughout the whole project, they worked in synergy with the Italian Space Agency, University of Bologna, Argotec S.r.l. and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory personell.

The maneouvers they constantly worked on and performed by the small on-board engine, where aimed to avoid the debris generated by the impact while optimally pointing the on-board cameras to take the highest number of useful images, which will be later downloaded to Earth, to let the National Institute of Astrophysics scientists, coordinated by Dr Elisabetta Dotto, leader of the mission, work on their postprocessing.

LICIA represents a technological pathfinder and a primacy in the CubeSat arena, as it paves the way for such class of satellites to gaina role even on highly challenging space missions; moreover, LICIA witnesses a successful and profitable collaboration between Academy, Research Center and small enterprise, under the coordination of the Italian Space Agency, confirming the excellence of the technical-scientific competences of our Country and the professionality of our young researchers in an extremely high-profile international arena,
Michèle Lavagna

Credits cover image: NASA – Johns Hopkins, APL – Steve Gribben.png

Hybris: structural batteries for electric aircraft

Posted on 04/03/202206/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Hybris is developed by a research group consisting of professors and students of the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology of the Politecnico di Milano.

It is the design of a hybrid-electric aircraft with structural batteries.

Structural batteries are innovative multifunctional composite materials that can withstand mechanical loads while simultaneously storing electrical energy. Both the fuselage and the outside of the wings of the HYBRIS are made of structural batteries.

The inventors are Andrea Bernasconi, Fabio Biondani, Luca Capoferri, Alberto Favier, Federico Gualdoni, Carlo Riboldi, Lorenzo Trainelli, Carmen Velarde Lopez de Ayala

Hybris won the Intellectual Property Award (IPA) in the “aerospace” sector, as announced at the Italian Pavilion of Expo Dubai. It is the competition for Italian technological patents resulting from public research organised by the Ministry of Economic Development in collaboration with Netval (Network for Research Valorisation).

A total of 217 innovative patents developed by Universities, Research Centres and Scientific Hospitalisation and Treatment Institutions were considered for the competition; and 35 of these were selected for the final stage in Dubai.

At the end of the process, the award-winning projects were those able to propose innovations with the greatest economic and social impact in 7 technological areas of reference for the global ecological and digital transition: agritech and agrifood, cybersecurity, green tech, life science, future mobility, aerospace, and alternative energy.

A labyrinth that traps noise

Posted on 20/12/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Labyrinthine metamaterials capable of absorbing sound waves: this is the new technology developed by six students at the Alta Scuola Politecnica, an international programme reserved for the best students from the Politecnico di Milano and the Politecnico di Torino.

It consists of panels capable of absorbing sound due to a particular internal structure featuring innovative acoustic properties. In fact, the performance of the panels is not only due to their constituent components, but also their labyrinthine geometric shape, which makes the sound wave reflect multiple times, attenuating it until it disappears. It is as if the sound is ‘lost’ in the labyrinth. These structures are capable of muffling different types of sound, from those with average frequencies typical of speech and some musical instruments, to those with low frequencies caused by engines. They may therefore be applied to a wide range of sectors, from construction to automobiles to domestic environments.

The six students who created the panel are Leonardo Bettini, Venus Hasanuzzaman Kamrul, Emanuele Musso, Fabio Nistri, Davide Piciucco, and Matteo Zemello. The panels are light and low cost, since they can be produced entirely with 3D printing using plastic waste.

The project was tested and validated in the Department of Energy-DENERG ‘Galileo Ferraris’ at the Politecnico di Torino with the industrial partner Phononic Vibes, a company created in 2018 as a spin-off of the Politecnico di Milano. The project will continue under the FET – Boheme European research path coordinated by the Università di Trento with the involvement of the Politecnico di Torino, Imperial College of London, and ETH Zürich.