Graduate student and assistant professor receive fellowship from AFRL/DAGSI
The team of mechanical engineering graduate student Mohamad Al Nashar and assistant professor Alok Sutradhar have received a fellowship award to support their research in materials and manufacturing.
The fellowship comes from the Air Force Research Laboratory Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute (AFRL/DAGSI). Sutradhar and Al Nashars’ fellowship title is “Topology Optimization of Coupled Mechanical and Electromagnetic Designs.”
“In this project, we combine mechanical and electromagnetic topology optimization to design novel electromagnetic systems,” said Sutradhar.
The design proposed by the project will lead to new performance and integration opportunities. This includes systems that are lighter, more compact and affordable.
“New technologies that are adaptive, reconfigurable, provide spectrum flexibility with reduced cost, size, weight, and power, which leverage advanced micro-electronics and macro-electronics devices, components, and structures can be designed,” said Sutradhar.
Al Nashar hopes the research will translate to technical readiness, allowing it to be implemented in real-world applications. The research will “Ideally improve the performance of integrated electromagnetic-mechanical designs,” said Al Nashar.
The focus of the work is topology optimized electromagnetic designs, and creating CNN-based neural network surrogate models for electromagnetic field distribution. Sutradhar and Al Nashar plan to begin their project in the summer.
About AFRL/DAGSI
The AFRL/DAGSI Ohio Student-Faculty Research Fellowship program, funded primarily through DAGSI by the Ohio Board of Regents (OBR), supports graduate science and engineering students and faculty who conduct research in areas targeted by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The key objectives of the program are to strengthen AFRL research ties to Ohio's academic science and engineering community, stimulate effective collaboration between Ohio universities and the AFRL, leverage Ohio research funding through use of AFRL resources and to develop research talent to fulfill future AFRL and Ohio's high-tech workforce needs.
