Patricia García Caspueñas has been awared the Best Master Thesis 2024 award by the Colegio Oficial de Ingenieros Aeronáuticos de España. Her thesis was developed in collaboration with the NEXTFLOW team, and stood out due to its technical excellence and innovation in a critical area for the aerospace industry.
Patricia’s work focuses on modelling the behaviour of actively-controlled turbulent flows in aerodynamics. Her approach is based on autoencoders, a machine-learning strategy to obtain compact representations of complex phenomena. Patricia then used recurrent neural networks to predict the flow behaviour in time.
The main novelty is that this is applied in flows under control actions. Active control is an extremely promising avenue to reduce the environmental footprint of airplane and road transport, enhance the efficiency of energy generation from wind, as well as improve the safety of the operation of urban air mobility. The thesis of Patricia sets the ground for future developments of the EAP Lab in the prediction of flows when active flow control is applied, which is paramount for optimization and design of control strategies.
