DEFAINE Master’s student wins 1st prize at the 20th PEGASUS Student Conference

Santiago Valencia, Aerospace Engineering Master’s student from the Flight Performance and Propulsion track of Delft University, has won the 1st prize at the 20th PEGASUS*-AIAA Student Conference, with a paper based on his thesis "Optimization Strategies for System Architecting Problems". Santiago conducted his research within the ITEA project DEFAINE, funded by RVO (Netherlands) and Vinnova (Sweden), at GKN Fokker Aerostructures, one of the industrial partners within the DEFAINE consortium. For his research, Santiago also used knowledge-based engineering software from ParaPy B.V., another partner in the DEFAINE consortium.

Santiago’s research encompassed the development of computational strategies to search the architectural design space of airframe components for optimum designs. In his work he focused on the structural optimisation of a UAV aileron, for which he performed multi-objective, multidisciplinary optimisation to find the best position of structural elements like ribs and hinges that result in the lowest weight and cost. One of the goals of the research was to explore the most convenient combination of optimisation strategy and algorithm and apply it in an industrial setting.

Santiago’s work is an excellent example of collaborative work within an ITEA project, including the involvement of students and young researchers.

We would like to congratulate Santiago with his prize and wish him success in the continuations of his career as a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal.

*PEGASUS is a cooperation of European Aerospace engineering universities.