Santiago Valencia Ibáñez recognized for pioneering aerospace design strategies
Santiago Valencia Ibáñez has been awarded first place at the 20th Pegasus-Europe AIAA student conference 2024 for his Master’s thesis on system architecture optimization in aerospace engineering. His work aims to prevent the premature dismissal of product architectures that could lead to the best-performing designs, crucial for next-generation, sustainable aircraft. The results of Valencia Ibáñez's thesis make it easier to identify the most promising and feasible designs.
The early stages of designing complex aeronautical components involve numerous interrelated decisions and competing objectives. Traditionally, optimization starts from a predetermined product design based on a selected architecture, using numerical methods to improve it. However, initial design decisions on the architecture are often based on experience and qualitative assessment, leading to potentially optimal designs being discarded prematurely. Valencia Ibáñez’s research aims to bridge the architecting and optimizing stages of the design process by including architectural variables in the optimization loop. Removing the step of selecting just a few architectures to optimize down the line, leads to superior solutions and a more thorough design space exploration at these early stages.
It was challenging to design a methodology that could follow the most promising approaches while discarding those that did not deliver," Valencia Ibáñez explains. "I opted for a gradual approach using problems of increasing complexity to learn which strategies would work best in a real-world setting. Being able to drop techniques that yielded lesser results early saved me quite some time down the line!
Valencia Ibáñez's thesis was supervised by Dr. La Rocca, who remarks,
“Santiago's work was part of the ITEA 4 project DEFAINE. The outcome shows how far we can innovate when university and industry collaborate. Santiago worked part-time at GKN Aerospace on an industry-relevant challenge, applying and extending a design methodology introduced at our faculty. The company Parapy, a spin-off from the faculty, was also partly involved. All partners of the DEFAINE consortium, involving several companies and universities from the Netherlands and Sweden, recognized his work as innovative and highly relevant.”
“Winning this prize is a great honor," Valencia Ibáñez says. "It means I’ll get to participate in the worldwide AIAA International Student Conference next year, and I also received a cash prize!”
PEGASUS is a partnership of the best European aerospace universities and currently has 31 members in 12 countries. Each year, the PEGASUS Student Conference invites the best students to present technical papers. The 20th conference was held at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Terrassa on April 26-27, 2024, with 37 participants from 8 countries delivering 35 presentations. TU Delft was represented by Santiago Valencia Ibáñez and Elise Scheers. Valencia Ibáñez was named the best Aerospace Master student in Europe. Thanks to his win, Delft University of Technology will have to organize the academic part of next year’s conference. That conference will be held at CVUT in Prague.