PhD Student - Aircraft Wakes
Ignace Ransquin obtained in 2017 a master of science in electro-mechanics at the Université Catholique de Louvain, as well as a master of science in Aerospace Engineering at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (Toulouse, France) thanks to the TIME dual degree exchange program. He has started his PhD in 2018 under the supervision of Pr. Philippe Chatelain at the institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil Engineering.
His passion for aeronautics, and his interest in a wide variety of disciplines led him to study the interactions of aircraft with their environment. Indeed, Ignace’s work focuses on the study of formation flying control schemes within a group of aircraft, by associating and combining existing tools and methodologies in the fields of fluid dynamics, control and learning. The formation flight problem can be split into the following challenges: 1) flow sensing, 2) optimum tracking control scheme, 3) physical models required for sensing complex wake scenarios and 4) interactions engineered to lead to a collaborative behavior. Ignace is currently working on data assimilations tools able to detect the precise location of vortices, using surrogate models of aircraft dynamics. By comparing measurements coming from an in-house CFD solvers (i.e. Vortex Particle/Mesh VPM solver) to those models, an estimation of the position of a leader's wake can be provided to the follower, an used to maintain the optimal position within a wake. The use of reinforcement learning tools is envisioned at the moment to improve the accuracy of the estimation process.
Ignace has already worked on innovative tracking strategies, he still has 2 years left to help bring the concept of formation flying into commercial aviation. Want more info ? Send him an e-mail !