Aerospace Mechanics Research Center

Professor Iain Boyd discusses directed energy weapons and the Havana Syndrome in a new column published in The Conversation: The latest episodes of so-called Havana syndrome, a series of unexplained ailments afflicting U.S. and Canadian diplomats and spies, span the globe. They include two diplomats in Hanoi, Vietnam - which...

Check out the latest Buff Innovator Insights Podcast with Dr. Iain Boyd, H.T. Sears Memorial Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at CU Boulder. We’ll hear about how Dr. Boyd followed his early interest in math from Scotland to England, and then...

John Evans has been named 2021 Educator of the Year by the Rocky Mountain Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Evans, an assistant professor and the Jack Rominger Faculty Fellow in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is an expert in fluid dynamics...

Physicists love recreating the world in software. A simulation lets you explore many versions of reality to find patterns or to test possibilities. But if you want one that’s realistic down to individual atoms and electrons, you run out of computing juice pretty quickly. Machine-learning models can approximate detailed simulations,...

Professor Iain Boyd shares the myraid ways space impacts the daily lives of billions of people worldwide, and its increasing importance to national defense in a new column in the Colorado Gazette. Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives on campus in addition to being a professor in...

Think of them as master Lego builders, only at an atomic scale. Engineers at CU Boulder have taken a major step forward in combing advanced computer simulations with artificial intelligence to try to predict how electronics, like the transistors in your cell phone, will fail. The new research was led...

Pawel Sawicki, a PhD student in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder, is the lead author on a paper that recently won the AIAA Thermophysics Best Student Paper award at SciTech 2021. The article – titled “Influence of Chemical Kinetics Models on Plasma...

Robyn Macdonald is pushing the frontiers of extremely high speed research: hypersonics. A new assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Macdonald joins a growing group of faculty conducting research into the extreme conditions faced at Mach 5...

Iain Boyd has an unusual specialty: He studies the insanely fast. The aerospace engineer specializes in hypersonic flight—or when vehicles hit speeds of roughly 4,000 miles per hour or more, the kind of conditions that spacecraft face when they’re plunging through the atmospheres of Earth or even Mars. At those...

New findings from CU Boulder researchers in Physical Review Applied show that nanoscale structures on the surfaces of silicon membranes can significantly change the way that heat travels through the bulk of the membrane. This work could make existing devices that operate through silicon and other semiconductors – like cell...