Full Professor of Flow Control: “I feel honoured”

On July 1st, Marios Kotsonis started as Full Professor of Flow Control at TU Delft’s faculty of Aerospace Engineering. A new position, both for Marios and for the faculty. “I certainly feel honoured and humbled by this appointment. Mostly, I am extremely proud of the excellent work done by the former and current PhD candidates and researchers in my team. It is a privilege to work with them.”

New position, new challenges

“A new position brings new opportunities at many levels. Within the university, I want to continue striving for a more equal, diverse, and transparent working environment. More locally, this new position will help me and my group to consolidate our expertise and facilities towards our goal for a more sustainable future. Through Flow Control we can enable a broad range of objectives such as aerodynamic drag reduction, lift enhancement, noise suppression and unsteady loads control, finding applications in aviation, wind energy, ground transportation and other energy-critical fields. Right now, we are looking into many different control methods, such as plasma actuators, metamaterials, wall cooling and unsteady jets. Combining our modelling tools, outstanding facilities and extensive collaboration network we can contribute to the understanding of challenging flow physics and bring these ideas many steps forward towards application and impact.”

Understanding and controlling

“Flow Control is inherently multi-disciplinary. It leverages flow physics, mathematics, control theory and development of actuators/sensors. At the same time, it necessitates a synergy of theory, simulation, and experiments. My ambition in this field is to first understand the physics of the flows we are trying to control, and then devise novel active and passive methods of controlling them. These methods should not only be effective but also practical, robust and simple enough to find their way into application and impact.”