Dr. Ana Vukovic from the University of Nottingham's George Green Institute for Electromagnetics Research joined us to talk about her incredible computational modeling work. She shared examples of how their computer modeling technology can greatly reduce the time and expense involved in testing the electromagnetic properties of new parts, including lightning protection, HIRF and RF designs.

Her team at the University of Nottingham, including Dr. Trevor Benson and Dr. Phil Sewell, are doing amazing things to improve efficiency of parts engineering in the aerospace industry, among others. What previously might take weeks and months to develop and test can now be tested in as a little as a day using their unique computational modeling techniques.

Contact Dr. Vukovic via email or visit the George Green Institute page at the University of Nottingham.

Watch the video version of this podcast on YouTube.

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Struck Podcast EP14: Dr. Ana Vukovic from the University of Nottingham on Computer Modeling

https://youtu.be/q_3hn0dbdcM

Here on Struck, we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection.

Alright, Allen, we got a guest today from across the pond. So who are we talking to today?

Allen Hall: It's Ana Vukovic with the University of Nottingham. She is in computation modeling. And they have developed some really interesting software and technology over the last couple of years so that we can now.

Really simulate aircraft, uh, installations, even on wind turbines, we can do some of the complex geometries we couldn't do before, because we didn't have the techniques. So on I and our group over there have developed these techniques and, uh, [00:01:00] surely gonna open a whole number of doors in aerospace. And obviously is we're all coming out of COVID.

Uh, one of the things that's really trying to save costs and move programs forward. Well, this is one way to do it.

Dan: Yeah. So it was interesting conversation. Obviously I'm not an engineer, so me being the outsider, it, it still boils down and it makes a lot of sense. So obviously when you're trying to engineer new parts for an aircraft, it's incredibly expensive, takes incredibly expensive people to do so it takes a lot of time.

And when you're ready to test these systems together, so not just like an antenna, but the whole radon with antenna inside and diverter strips on the outside of this whole complex thing currently, you guys have to actually build it. And then in most of this is actually put on the plane just to test it, to maybe see if, if there's an effect at all, or if there's like an incremental effect, which seems like a terrible waste of time and money.

And so it is it's can do this on a computer modeling or on computer modeling. Yeah. And just be done with it, which [00:02:00] sounds like, I mean, just makes a ton of sense.

Allen Hall: It makes a lot more sense. You're going to get better products at the end of the day and less expensive products, uh, in the computational world.

We've been trying to get here for since the 1970s, mid 1970s. So it's been a long haul and obviously the computational power we have now. Helps because we doing a lot of computations, but a lot of this is trying to cut down the computations. And then the techniques that have been developed at the university of Nottingham reduce the amount of computational time it takes to do some of these complex problems.

So not only do we have the horsepower now, but we're also smarter about the way we use the horsepower, which cuts down on cost.

Dan: And so she, they have more capabilities then. So in the industry, COMSOL is the software that. You can have a computer at your desktop, you know,