Below are the main research lines of ETSIAE. Within each one, specific research areas are detailed. For more information, you can contact the Subdirectorate of Research and Doctorate: subdireccion.id.aeroespacial@upm.es.

1. Analysis and Design of Missions and Aerospace Vehicles

• Design of small aerial vehicles (MAV, micro air vehicles)
• Design of bioinspired aircraft
• Attitude control of spacecraft
• Scientific operations in microgravity
• Experimentation in microgravity
• Orbital mechanics and mission design
• Space mission design
• Design and simulation of aerospace structures
• Propeller and Rotor Systems
• Solar Power
• Astrodynamics: Orbital perturbations
• Analytical and semi-analytical methods
• Minimum distance between orbits (asteroids, space debris)
• Structural dynamics, vibro-acoustics
• Aeroelasticity

2. Plasma Physics and Technological Applications

• Numerical simulation of inertial confinement fusion processes

3. Fluid Mechanics, Heat Transfer, and Combustion

• Hydrogen combustion, thermoacoustic instabilities, direct use of alternative fuels
• Compressible flow, shock waves, detonations, supersonic combustion
• Electrohydrodynamics
• Combustion
• Space Thermal Engineering
• Thermal control with phase change materials (PCMs)
• Vibrated fluids in microgravity
• Sloshing control
• Fluid physics in microgravity, bifurcations, symmetries
• Aeromechanical phenomena in sustainable aviation engine configurations
• Reduced models for improving aircraft aerodynamic performance and damage diagnostics
• Modeling and optimization of fluid dynamics problems
• Analysis and development of the Lattice Boltzmann method
• Geothermal energy
• Large-scale thermal energy storage
• Development of mathematical models, reduced models, deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence tools, data science, CFD simulation, control tools
• Flow control
• Propeller and Rotor Systems
• Solar Power
• Boundary Layers and Heat Transfer: Laminar
• Boundary Layers and Heat Transfer: Turbulent
• Separated Flows
• Subsonic Flow
• Unsteady Flows
• Experimental fluid mechanics and combustion
• Aeroelasticity
• Turbulence
• Large-scale computation
• Computational fluid mechanics
• CFD: Modeling and simulation
• Modeling of reduced chemistry for combustion
• Phase change modeling
• Reactive flow problems
• Mathematical modeling and numerical resolution of reactive flows
• Numerical methods for high Reynolds number flows
• Numerical methods for compressible multi-material flows
• Data analysis of fluid and biomedical mechanics using data-driven techniques
• Visualization of flow at extremely low Reynolds numbers

4. Design, Modeling, and Simulation of Systems

• Surface physics and nanomaterials
• Artificial intelligence: Reservoir neural networks. Prediction of complex time series. Applications to predictive maintenance and detection of large fluctuations
• Non-linear deterministic and stochastic dynamics, time-delay systems, unstable dynamics. Critical state systems
• Turbulence: Analytical description of the cascade process. Relevance in information processing. Multifractality. Complex systems
• Inverse problems and numerical methods

5. Aerodynamics

• Visualization of flow at extremely low Reynolds numbers
• Low Reynolds number aerodynamics
• Computational fluid mechanics (CFD): High-order methods (DG) and lattice Boltzmann methods
• Boltzmann (LBM): Mesh adaptation methods
• Boltzmann (LBM): Multiphase
• Machine learning: Deep neural networks. Regression: Reinforcement learning. Unsupervised machine learning (clustering)
• Data analysis of fluid and biomedical mechanics using data-driven techniques
• Dynamics and stability of the in-flight refueling system using the hose-and-drogue method
• Unsteady aerodynamics for compressible flows and active aeroelastic control in two-dimensional wings
• Experimental civil aerodynamics

6. Aerospace Production and Materials

• Advanced alloys: Physical and mechanical metallurgy
• Advanced and smart materials
• Metamaterials applied to vibration attenuation
• Nanomaterials
• High-performance metallic materials produced by additive manufacturing, metal powder recycling, and powder metallurgy
• Bioengineering of tissue mechanics, cellular behavior, and growth

7. Air Transport Systems and Operations

• Air transport
• Safety analysis and evaluation models in ATM (Air Traffic Management)
• Performance evaluation of human factors in ATM automation
• Traffic flow and capacity prediction models
• Air traffic management (ATM), air traffic control (ATC), and the introduction of AI in these areas
• Avionics systems simulation

8. Technologies for Decarbonizing Energy and Transportation

• Hydrogen combustion, thermoacoustic instabilities, direct use of alternative fuels
• Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)
• Photovoltaic and photorefractive effects, optical damage, manipulation of particles using photovoltaic optical tweezers
• Synthetic turbulence generation applied to atmospheric turbulence for aeroelastic simulation of wind turbines
• Modeling of energy systems with high renewable penetration applied to wind energy analysis in the decarbonization process
• Improvement of cup anemometer performance and wind speed measurement accuracy
• Theoretical study of high-efficiency photovoltaic materials
• Aerodynamic response of flat solar trackers and solar tables
• Wind Energy:
  • Computational models for conceptual wind turbine design
  • Vortex shedding from wind turbine towers
  • Reduced aeroelastic models of wind turbines
  • Damping of resonances using dynamic dampers
  • Simulation of floating wind turbines and multiple rotors
  • OpenFAST-FVM
  • Time series prediction
  • Generation of synthetic wind using SRM and VARM
  • WRF-LES-GAL simulation
  • Prediction (microscale) of wind fields at sites using CFD for wind resource estimation
  • Computational and Experimental Aeroacoustics for Noise Prediction and Control

9. Other

• Computational simulation of solids, multiphase physical systems, and structures
  • Bioengineering of tissue mechanics, cellular behavior, and growth
  • Artificial intelligence, digital twins, and computer vision
  • Metamaterials and structural engineering

• Digital transformation and entrepreneurship in the aerospace industry
• Dynamic and fatigue behavior of materials used in civil engineering, especially concrete
• Self-repairing processes of cementitious materials