Congratulations to Aerospace Ph.D. student Lawren Gamble, first-place recipient of the 2018 Bioinspiration, Biomimetics, and Bioreplication Best Student Paper Award, presented by the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE). Her winning paper is entitled, “Bioinspired pitch control using a piezoelectric horizontal tail for rudderless UAVs.”
Gamble researches in the Adaptive, Intelligent and Multifunctional Structures (AIMS) Lab, led by Aerospace Engineering Chair Dr. Daniel Inman. In her research, she seeks to improve aircraft flight performance through bioinspired wing morphing by using smart materials. The goal of her work is to optimize an extended nonlinear lifting line model designed to predict span-wise varying aileron deflections. The model’s accurate predictions can help the morphing finite wing to recover from stall. Currently, Gamble’s work focuses on developing a method of yaw control for flying wing UAVs with a bioinspired horizontal control surface using piezoelectric and shape memory alloy actuators.
Lawren Gamble will be defending her dissertation in the summer of 2018 and will continue working with Dr. Inman as a postdoc.
