Team

A multidisciplinary group

The team gathers for the first time a group of professionals with well-balanced skills on artificial intelligence and machine learning and aircraft design and H2 propulsive plants. All this with application to problems related to aviation and climate change, which also requires interdisciplinary skills.

Aircraft Operations Lab

This subgroup has expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning with application to aviation related problems and, in particular, climate change and meteorology. The team is formed by one the PIs and coordinator of the project, Manuel Soler, and six people of his research group (an assistant professor, two post-docs, two PhD students and a Master student that has applied for a FPU and is awaiting response.

Aeroelastic and Structural Design Lab

Their area of expertise lies in aircraft design, multidisciplinary optimization, H2 propulsive plants. The team is led by one of the PIs, Rauno Cavallaro, the co-leader of the research group ASDLab (https://aero.uc3m.es/asd_lab-home/) is Andrea Cini (Profesor Visitante), and it is also integrated by several PhD students.

Manuel Soler

Associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain, where he is director of the Doctoral Program in Aerospace Engineering. His current research interests focus on the exploitation of machine learning techniques for the calculation of optimal trajectories, stochastic processes, meteorology, and climate change with application to air transport and air traffic management (ATM). He has published more than 60 articles in Web of Science journals and at international conferences and directs or has directed 10 doctoral theses. Currently, he is the coordinator of the SESAR H2020, ALARM and START projects, and is also Principal Investigator in three other SESAR H2020 projects (FlyATM4E, FMP-Met, and ISOBAR), a national project (Met-ATS) and a regional project (Hydrogenating). He received the SESAR award for young scientists in 2013 and the Luis Azcárraga award from the En Aire foundation in 2016 and 2019, which rewards unique work in air transport. 

Rauno Cavallaro

Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Carlos III University of Madrid, in Spain. His current research focuses on aeroelasticity and aero-structural optimization of new generation wings, as well as on multidisciplinary design and optimization (MDO) of reduced-environmental impact/carbon-neutral aircraft, such as electric/hydrogen-powered airplanes. He is the principal investigator of several projects led by industries (such as Airbus or Aernnova), as well as by research institutes (CIRA), or financed by the Madrid regional government. In 2012 he was awarded the Best Structures Paper Award at the prestigious AIAA-Scitech forum. 

Andrea Cini

BSc in Aerospace Engineering and MSc in Aeronautical Engineering, with specialisation in Aircraft Structure (University of Pisa). In 2009 Andrea earned the PhD degree at Cranfield University, UK, in the field of Fatigue and Damage Tolerance. Subsequently he developed his research activity in Aerostructures and Fatigue and Damage Tolerance as research Fellow at Cranfield University and Scuola Sant’Anna, Pisa, working on damage evolution in metallic and composite materials and design of bio-inspired flapping wing robots. In 2013 Andrea moved to industry, as manager of the Design and Development department of Asso Werke s.r.l., where he designed pistons for customers such as Ferrari, Audi, BMW and McLaren.
Andrea came back to academia in 2015 joining the Centre for Aerospace Manufacturing at the University of Nottingham, UK, as Project Manager and Stress and Design technical authority in the Clean Sky 2 EU research project, ASTRAL. Later he also occupied the position of Aerostructures Theme Lead at the Centre for Aerospace Manufacturing. In 2019 he joined University Carlos III of Madrid as “Profesor Visitante”. His research focuses on innovative aircraft structural configurations, hybrid/electric aircraft, minimum weight optimisation, conceptual design tools, “Non-black metal” composite design and damage evolution prediction in aerospace materials.

Abolfazl Simorgh

Ph.D. Student and Research Assistant in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Carlos III University of Madrid, in Spain. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in control systems in 2017 and 2020, respectively. The main focus of his Master’s study was on developing techniques capable of controlling non-linear systems using optimal control, adaptive control, and robust control. He is currently doing his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Manuel Soler. The gross of his Ph.D. research is the robust optimization of aircraft trajectories considering climate impacts associated with CO2 and non-CO2 emissions and different sources of uncertainty, including uncertainty in the standard weather forecast. His research interests include Mathematical Control Theory, Optimization, Robust Trajectory Optimization, and Climate Change. He is currently participating in EU-Projects FLyATM4E for robust aircraft trajectory optimization and ALARM for developing a library called Environmental library (EnVLib) and a regional project on hydrogenating.

Raúl Quibén

PhD student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Carlos III University of Madrid, in Spain, where he studied the MSc in Aeronautical Engineering. His current research is focused on multidisciplinary optimization of H2 aircraft design and operations with an environmental impact perspective, as a part of HYDROGENATING project. Besides, he has coursed BSc Aerospace Engineering in University of Vigo (Spain) and has done study and research stages at TOHOKU University (Japan) and Politecnico di Milano (Italy).

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