This research will also advance new applications in energy harvesting from large vibrations, morphing structures, and robotics, and will impact art and architecture, where the current trend is to use assemblies of cables, bars, and membranes for lightness, transparency, and increased urban aesthetics, he added.
"Cornel's work successfully bridges multiple disciplines in a way that is especially applicable to aerospace engineering as autonomous aerospace vehicles are steadily decreasing in size and increasing in functionality. Energy-harvesting and shape-changing are just two of the functions that his bio-inspired approach to vehicles is going to revolutionize," said Christopher Hall, AOE professor and department head.
Sultan, the co-holder of one patent on an orthopedic implant, is a reviewer for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Journal, Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, Journal of Aircraft, International Journal of Solids and Structures, International Journal of Space Structures, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, and the Journal of Sound and Vibration.
Among his honors, he received a 1996 NASA Fellowship, a 1998 Puskas Fellowship from Purdue University, and two United Technologies Research Center Publication Awards in 2006 and in 2007. He also earned a Romanian Outstanding Student Fellowship in 1990, 1991, and 1992, given to only the top one percent nationally.
Just prior to coming to Virginia Tech, Sultan spent three years with the United Technologies Research Center of East Hartford, CT., in a senior technical leadership position. He was the principal investigator for its autonomous formation flying helicopters control project in cooperation with the University of California at Berkeley. He was also task leader for the Sikorsky swash-plateless rotor he
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| Contact: Lynn Nystrom tansy@vt.edu 540-231-4371 Virginia Tech Source:Eurekalert |