Of particular interest are novel full-field techniques employing molecular luminescence to quantify surface strain, heat flux, temperature, pressure, and shear stress.  This emerging field has broad application to engineers, chemists, physicists, biologists, and medical researchers.  Applications of these techniques are widely useful to the aerospace and automotive communities as these methods bridge physical testing and analytical modeling in a variety of areas.  Examples include load and heating predictions on aircraft, evaluation of fluid-structure interactions, validation of computational methods, nondestructive detection of candidate failure locations on mechanical components, and inverse-method techniques to determine load and boundary conditions.  This work is currently funded by the NSF through the Sensors and Sensor Technology program of CMMI as well as collaborations with CUBRC.

Another area of interest is the aerodynamic and structural characterization of micro aerial vehicles with flexible wings/geometries.  MAVs, often biologically inspired, can provide a low-cost platform of surveillance, detection and assessment.   However, the flow physics of low Reynolds number flow over actively and passively flexed wings is not well understood.  Using point-wise and full-field measurement techniques (HW, LV, PIV, VIC) and traditional force-balance testing, insight into the fluid-structure interaction can be gained.  This research has been funded by the University of Florida REEF via an AFOSR contract.