Aerospace Mechanics Research Center

Professor Iain Boyd shares the myraid ways space impacts the daily lives of billions of people worldwide, and its increasing importance to national defense in a new column in the Colorado Gazette. Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives on campus in addition to being a professor in...

Think of them as master Lego builders, only at an atomic scale. Engineers at CU Boulder have taken a major step forward in combing advanced computer simulations with artificial intelligence to try to predict how electronics, like the transistors in your cell phone, will fail. The new research was led...

Pawel Sawicki, a PhD student in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder, is the lead author on a paper that recently won the AIAA Thermophysics Best Student Paper award at SciTech 2021. The article – titled “Influence of Chemical Kinetics Models on Plasma...

Robyn Macdonald is pushing the frontiers of extremely high speed research: hypersonics. A new assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Macdonald joins a growing group of faculty conducting research into the extreme conditions faced at Mach 5...

Iain Boyd has an unusual specialty: He studies the insanely fast. The aerospace engineer specializes in hypersonic flight—or when vehicles hit speeds of roughly 4,000 miles per hour or more, the kind of conditions that spacecraft face when they’re plunging through the atmospheres of Earth or even Mars. At those...

New findings from CU Boulder researchers in Physical Review Applied show that nanoscale structures on the surfaces of silicon membranes can significantly change the way that heat travels through the bulk of the membrane. This work could make existing devices that operate through silicon and other semiconductors – like cell...

Fourteen university innovators including Smead Aerospace's Mahmoud Hussein and Scott Palo pitched their technologies at Lab Venture Challenge (LVC), a funding competition hosted by Venture Partners at CU Boulder that helps commercially-promising technologies accelerate into impactful business ventures. Judges from the local entrepreneurial ecosystem awarded a record total of 12...

Timothy K. Minton is expanding critical research at the edge of space – uncovering chemical and physical processes in extreme environments like those experienced by satellites in Low Earth Orbit and hypersonic vehicles. A new professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University...

As we practice distancing for the greater good, we also want to stay connected and be available to our students, both prospective and admitted. We might be far from you, but we’re still here to connect. Whether you're celebrating acceptance or just interested in exploring Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences, check...

The College of Engineering and Applied Science moved up three places in this year’s U.S. News and World Reports Best Graduate Schools rankings , coming in at No. 14 among public institutions and No. 27 overall. Three engineering degree programs ranked in the top 10 public programs, and four more...