Grad students recognized for research across aerospace disciplines

Graduate students in aerospace engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign were recently recognized as the best across several disciplines including celestial mechanics and space systems, learning methods in controls, aircraft technology and aerospace materials.

Sigfried Eggl’s Ph.D. student, Rahil Makadia, won the student competition at the 9th IAA Planetary Defense Conference. His presentation, “Design Constraints for Asteroid Deflection Campaigns Based on Delta-V Estimation Timelines,” can be viewed on Youtube. 

“One of the risks in pushing asteroids away from the Earth is that the spacecraft used to do so might be over-designed and/or the target asteroid might be too weak,” Makadia said. “In such a scenario, we might unintentionally break the asteroid apart instead of appropriately deflecting it. This could result in many smaller rocks headed towards the Earth instead of a single bigger one. A proposed solution for avoiding this is to send multiple smaller spacecraft to push the asteroid away.

“My work determines the minimum time needed in between each of these pushes. This will enable the assessment of whether the Earth is safe from the potential asteroid impact after each push so we can safely conclude the asteroid deflection campaign and lead to more effective design of future deflection missions.”

Melkior Ornik’s Ph.D. student, Gokul Puthumanaillam, received the Young Author Award at the 14th International Federation of Automatic Control Symposium on Advances in Control Education for his paper, “The Lazy Student's Dream: ChatGPT Passing an Engineering Course on Its Own.” He presented the research in Budapest last month.

“We systematically put ChatGPT through every one of the 115 homework sets, exams and code projects in the junior-level aerospace control systems course AE353, asking only the bare-minimum prompts a time-pressed ‘lazy’ student might use,” Puthumanaillam said.

“The model’s B-level performance, or 82%, demonstrates that today’s large language models can already master most structured control-systems problems while still stumbling on open-ended design work. This insight challenges instructors to rethink assessment and pedagogy in controls so AI becomes a deliberate, integrated tool rather than an end-run around learning.’ For more, visit the project website.

Phil Ansell’s master’s degree student, Cole Pawlak, received the 2025 SciTech Electrified Aircraft Technology Technical Committee Best Paper Award for his paper entitled, “Aluminum-Air Batteries for Aircraft Applications,” with co-authors Emily A. Lory and Phillip J. Ansell.

“I am investigating aluminum-air batteries as an energy carrier for regional air transportation—a category that accounts for around 37 percent of all aviation emissions,” Pawlak said. “Although aluminum-air cells have been studied previously, they lack the integration capabilities for aircraft.  To this point, I have developed thin—about 200 micrometers—hydrogel electrolytes and nickel foam cathodes that have been tested on the single-cell level.  In this upcoming year, I will be producing multi-cell packs and building a UAV test bed for these batteries.”

Jeff Baur’s Ph.D. student, Asim Shahzad, received the Outstanding Technical Paper Award at the 2025 conference of the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering. His paper is entitled, “Additive Manufacturing and Mechanical Testing of Topology Optimized Continuous Carbon Fiber Reinforced Thermosetting Composites."

“Drawing from experimentally determined material failure values and manufacturing constraints of the additive deposition of reactive resin-infused fiber, we showed the optimization of continuous carbon fiber reinforced composites,” Shahzad said. “We introduced an innovative print path approach to address intersections and sharp corners, enabling the realization of optimized structures and overcoming the limitations of current methods. Then we manufactured and tested optimized designs, revealing a variation of about 3 percent between experimental and numerical predictions of strength and stiffness, a 2.5 percent variation in measured strength and stiffness values between experimental samples achieving more than double the specific mechanical performance.

“This additive manufacturing approach can harness the exceptional mechanical properties of fiber reinforced thermoset composites with significant potential for predictable application within the aerospace and automotive industries, where integrating optimization, advanced materials and manufacturing is crucial for enhancing structural performance and efficiency.”