Coding, research and cycling are three constants for Aadit Kolar

Aadit Kolar has been coding since he was 10 years old, and he’s still looking for ways to write better, more efficient code. During his first year studying aerospace engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he participated in the Illini Formula SAE as an embedded software engineer while watching for opportunities to do undergraduate research, his second constant. And then there is cycling, some alone or extreme like 100 miles on gravel, but always part of his week. 

Kolar is in his fourth year of the 5-year program in aerospace engineering that combines a bachelor’s and master’s degree. When he was in his second year, Matthew Clarke joined the faculty and was looking for students to work with him. Kolar jumped at the chance. 

Because of his coding experience, Kolar was assigned to creating a graphic user interface for Clarke’s aircraft design program called RCAIDE, which stands for Research Community Aircraft Interdisciplinary Design Environment. Kolar said RCAIDE is unique in that it can simulate aircraft over an entire mission, rather than at a single point in a flight.

“RCAIDE is almost exclusively used by graduate students,” Kolar said. “It’s not very beginner-friendly, in that, you need to know how to use Python. I was charged with building an interface that could expand the user base to undergraduates and, possibly, the senior design course here.”

Kolar enjoys posing questions that he can answer through research, particularly in aircraft design.

“If an aircraft is designed to use normal jet fuel, what happens if we substitute a different fuel -- one that we can produce more sustainably like liquid petroleum gas or biofuel? What happens to the emissions? How does it affect its performance?”

Continuing those questions in Clarke’s lab, Kolar evaluated what happens when batteries or hybrid powertrains are introduced in aircraft design.

“It was a holistic review to answer what changes need to be made to the current powertrain to incorporate batteries. We asked questions about how much cabin space must be sacrificed to allow for heavy batteries or tanks.”

The answer? A lot.

“Could we improve efficiency by changing the way the aircraft uses the electricity over the course of the flight? Or how do we design aircraft that have the increased amount of space needed for these hydrogen tanks? That’s what I’m working on now.”

The work is a good fit for Kolar, who is also minoring in computer science. His passion is on the computational side of research.

“I find something very satisfying about optimizing the performance of a piece of code. At first, it gets you the result you need but it’s very slow. That’s ok to simulate one aircraft per day. But if we need to evaluate 500 or even 500 thousand aircraft, we either have to spend a lot of money on computers or write really good code.

“I do it by looking for what I can run together to speed things up. Instead of doing things one at a time, I look for how I can do 50 things at once—parallel functions that don’t slow each other down.”

At this point, Kolar has analyzed a number of aircraft design tools. Clarke asked the first question: what do users like and dislike about OpenVSP, a similar aircraft design software to RCAIDE with a graphical user interface.

“There were some pretty frequent pain points that we heard. Our goal is to make an interface that’s more intuitive and removes some of the pain points of older software.”

This past summer, Kolar worked with Cristina Riso at Georgia Tech under the Research Experience for Undergrads program. He was set to improve code that simulates aeroelasticity phenomena such as flutter.

“Normally the airflow over a wing will damp oscillations, but if you start going fast enough, the perturbation gets out of control, and the wing begins to flutter. The question I was trying to answer is, how do you predict that during the design phase of an aircraft? How do you evaluate whether a certain wing design will have these characteristics, and how do you do it quickly?

“My contribution at Georgia Tech was removing some quasi-steady flow assumptions from the code. Theirs assumed the only thing that mattered was the current state of the wing. I added code to account for the movement history of the wing, called wake effects.”

Back on campus for his senior year, Kolar’s research with Clarke is to expand RCAIDE's capabilities, such as evaluating the feasibility of aircraft designs by checking if there is space for all the necessary components.

Kolar said undergrad research helped prepare him for certain courses and led to opportunities like his summer at Georgia Tech.

He is also a recipient of the Scott R. White Engineering Visionary Scholarship. The fund was created to encourage and recognize undergraduate research in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. He said, getting the scholarship couldn’t have come at a better time.

“I had been working so hard and felt like I wasn’t getting any recognition. Then, in the space of two weeks, I got the scholarship and an offer from AFRL for a summer internship. It felt like people were seeing my hard work. Also, the scholarship also helps me graduate college with less debt, so I'm super grateful.”

In addition to research and coding, a constant for Kolar has been cycling – serving as an officer and twice-weekly long-distance rides with the Illini Cycling Club. Before launching into his final year at Illinois, Kolar will spend the entire summer on his bike as a member of the Illini 4000. Kolar, aerospace grad student Cole Pawlak and 12 other cyclists will ride coast to coast to raise money and awareness for cancer research.

“We each have to raise $4,000 in donations to cancer research and patient support services. Then, on the cross-country ride we’ll collect stories from people whose lives have been affected by cancer. It gives a voice to people that haven't necessarily been able to speak about it because we’re biking through small, rural towns like York, Nebraska that don’t normally get much news coverage.”

Kolar said he didn’t cycle much while growing up, but during COVID it became an escape. Since cycling in college, he has seen a lot more of the area surrounding Urbana-Champaign than most U. of I. students.

“I went to the Sweet Corn Festival in Hoopeston. The entrance fee is $2 and comes with unlimited sweet corn. I saw my first demolition derby there, too.”

“There are also just so many beautiful spots close by, like Homer Lake, Middle Fork, Kickapoo, Monticello, Lake of the Woods and Allerton. Living in this area is underrated. As a cyclist, I can be out of town in 10 minutes and go a long way without seeing a car, which is so peaceful.”

Even with juggling coursework, research and cycling responsibilities, Kolar has found time to pay it forward by working with Elle Wroblewski to develop a programming course. It will include an introduction to Python computing.

“The department has done so much for me. I want to help my fellow undergrads who may not have had a lot of coding experience before coming to Illinois.”