AE Seminar

Engineering the Future of Sustainable Aviation

featuring

Matthew Clarke

Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Monday, February 23

3:00 -4:00 p.m.

Weber Bldg. CoDE

About the Seminar:

The aviation industry faces a critical challenge: despite international commitments to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century, fundamental uncertainties regarding technology integration pathways have created barriers to investment. While traditional aircraft design methodologies have served conventional propulsion systems well, emerging technologies—including cryogenic hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuels, and hybrid/all-electric platforms—present unprecedented design challenges for novel vehicles and for their adoption into society. This talk presents three interconnected research efforts from the Laboratory for Electric Aircraft Design and Sustainability that address critical gaps across multiple engineering disciplines. First, I will present the experimental characterization of electrochemical energy storage systems under aviation-relevant operating conditions and discuss the implications for certification. Second, I will demonstrate how multidisciplinary design optimization informs the development of a next-generation hydrogen blended-wing-body aircraft. Finally, I will present a novel framework that couples reformulated frequency-domain acoustics with demographic and economic data to quantify the environmental and societal impacts of advanced air mobility operations across major U.S. metropolitan regions. Together, these efforts demonstrate how systems-level thinking, combined with targeted experimental validation, can accelerate the transition to sustainable aviation.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Matthew Clarke is an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at UIUC and a 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 Science Listee. He earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Howard University and completed his M.S. and Ph.D. in Aero/Astro at Stanford University in 2022. He then served as the Boeing Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT in the inaugural cohort of the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence. Prof. Clarke directs the Laboratory for Electric Aircraft Design and Sustainability, leveraging multi-physics computational modeling and experimentation to develop best practices for integrating advanced propulsion architectures into next-generation aerospace systems. A Tau Beta Pi fellow, he received numerous awards during his Ph.D., including Stanford's prestigious Lieberman Fellowship for demonstrated leadership potential in academia. Prof Clarke is also a member of  AIAA's Electric Aircraft Technology Technical Committee and the newly established IEEE Transportation Electrification Community Technical Committee on Electrified Aircraft.