Air Force awards $5M to FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, University of Florida collaboration on...

The FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida will collaborate on a new Air Force Office of Scientific Research Center of Excellence focused on high-speed flight and morphing aerospace vehicles, which can change shape while in flight.

The Florida State University-headquartered Florida Center for Advanced Aero-Propulsion (FCAAP) will manage the center, named “AEROMORPH: Aerospace Morphing via Integrated Sense, Assess and Respond.” The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Air Force Office of Scientific Research awarded the universities $5 million for the project.

Researchers will conduct fundamental research into morphing structures, conventional distributed sensing, state estimation and control systems that are crucial to aerospace morphing technology.

“This new Center of Excellence on morphing structures for aerospace applications will significantly enhance our research collaboration with the FCAAP partner institutions and Air Force Research Laboratories,” said FCAAP Director Rajan Kumar. “The consortium will allow our students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty to interact with AFRL engineers and scientists and develop technologies for next-generation high-speed flight vehicles.”

The interdisciplinary work will combine insights from information theory, network science, fluid-structure interactions, experimental aerodynamics and other disciplines.

“I am very excited to see this multidisciplinary team from FAMU-FSU and UF working together with the U.S. Air Force to solve fundamental problems associated with high-speed morphing aircraft,” said UF Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department (MAE) Chair Warren Dixon.

The research has both military and civilian applications.