Alberto Marín Cebrián, Abolfazl Simorgh and Giuseppe Di Pasquale have been awarded the Outstanding Thesis Awards for the academic year 2023-2024. The Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award is the tool whereby the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid commends the merit and uniqueness of doctoral theses developed at its institution.
This award takes into account the quality of doctoral research based on scientific and technological contributions. Taking into account the productivity of each doctoral programme, the award is annual or biennial. Participation is open to PhDs who graduated in the last academic year with top marks (mención cum laude).
The following is a brief introduction to the thesis of each of our graduates.
Two-dimensional model of wall interaction in Hall effect thruster discharges by Alberto Marín Cebrián
Hall effect thrusters are a leading technology in electric space propulsion, fully implemented but still with very active R&D plans to improve their performances in several directions: from a broader power and specific impulse ranges, to a longer lifetime, and improved throttleability and, of course, a higher thruster efficiency. The interaction of the plasma with the walls of the thruster chamber has a key role in the thruster efficiency, through energy losses and recombination at the walls, and the thruster lifetime, through chamber erosion by sputtering. Plasma-wall interaction is very dependent on the magnetic screening (or shielding) of the walls, the local features of the velocity distribution function of primary electrons, and the secondary electron emission. This Thesis proposal will attempt to model and characterize these problems.
The research will start from an existing kinetic (i.e. particle-based), radial (i.e. one-dimensional) SPT1Dr code, whose last version was developed by a previous PhD student of the research group. The first part of the Thesis will adapt and use SPT1Dr to further analyze several physical phenomena of interest. In the second part a new radial-axial (i.e. two-dimensional) code will be developed based on the lessons learned from SPT1Dr. The new code will be parallelized and will address the phenomena arising from the axial variation of the discharge and the strongly two-dimensional configuration of the applied magnetic topology.
Robust Aircraft Trajectory Optimization & Climate Change by Abolfazl Simorgh
Air traffic operations affect climate through the emission of carbon dioxides (CO2), water vapor (H2O), aerosols, and nitrogen oxides (NOx). The effects of non-CO2 emissions, triggering approximately two-thirds of aviation RF, vary significantly with geographic location, altitude, and time of the emission. To this end, this research will aim at optimizing the flight trajectories to avoid such climate-sensitive regions. The main expected gain would be developing a robust technique to optimize aircraft trajectories considering cost and climate impacts, which can be implemented with real-time or near-real-time computational times.
Multi-Disciplinary Optimization of Space Mobility Maneuvers for Commercial Applications of Micro Propulsion by Giuseppe Di Pasquale
The PhD aims at developing a tool for mission design and orbital maneuver planning for electrospray propulsion, solving the associated hybrid multi-objective optimal control problem, and finding a robust solution for the AOCS compatible with the first objective results, ultimately optimizing the GNC loop.
Our warmest congratulations to Alberto, Abolfazl and Giuseppe!
PhD in Aerospace Engineering UC3M 