Three UA engineering students were recognized for their groundbreaking research on sustainable aviation fuel and development of innovative experimental setups for emerging fuel adoption.
Vamsi Krishna Undavalli, Jerry Hamilton and Chuming Wei, all doctoral students studying mechanical engineering, earned second prize of the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Aviation Award and received a total of $150,000 from the $1 million prize pool for all nine winners.
The International Civil Aviation Organization and the General Civil Aviation Authority of the United Arab Emirates collaborate to organize this award open to states, organizations and individuals, with the goal of “recognizing their contribution to the success of the aviation industry.”
“This is a rigorous selection that happens with the jury committee and the technical evaluation committee,” Undavalli said. ”It’s not just students; the competition is open to researchers across the world.”
Undavalli, Hamilton and Wei said they sought to create more sustainable testing methods for aviation fuels. Hamilton focused on testing for fuel compatibility with different mechanical portions of the engine, Wei studied how emerging fuels performed under thermal stress, and Undavalli focused on the emissions and how to reduce them.
“A company who is developing fuels has all the different solutions they made, but they don’t have the money to invest in every single one,” Hamilton said. “This kind of pipeline and this kind of testing allows them to do a more inexpensive initial testing to choose which would be the best pathway to go.”
Hamilton said that Wei’s “very delicate heating and measuring process” for thermal stability tests was one of the most significant challenges of the research.
“My test is a little bit different than theirs because some data they cannot measure,” Wei said. “I’m using a new method where I take some samples of the fuel outside to measure what’s happening inside. No one has done that before.”
Another challenge the group said they faced was replicating the conditions of a real aircraft at a much smaller scale. They started with combustion test rigs for lab testing.
“Now we are venturing into a high-altitude emission test bench where we are trying to replicate what would happen at 40,000 feet,” Undavalli said.
Hamilton’s 20 years of past experience flying helicopters for the military contributed to the researchers’ real-world perspective.
“We were looking for ways throughout this whole process to inject a more realistic testing of what would actually happen from the time the fuel enters the tank, until it’s combusted, until the products are actually in the atmosphere,” Hamilton said.
The researchers said they believe that their tests could be the standard for the aviation industry and that they hope to see their research applied to real-world performances of aviation fuels.
“We created what maybe could be a preliminary benchmark before doing certification processes where much of the large fuel producers can come and avail this research and the test protocols, and eventually use this to better refine their fuel chemistry,” Undavalli said.
They said the global recognition they received has validated their hard work and is motivating them to pursue their goals even further.
“I spent a lot of time to design my experiment, and it always has a lot of problems and improvements that sometimes drive me crazy,” Wei said. “This award has really encouraged me for what I’ve been doing so far, and it’s really helped me to move further.”
