High-performance foiling yacht. Person shown for scale. Lorient, France, May 2023.
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering at the University of Michigan. I grew up in New York City and developed a passion for hydrodynamics and materials science while pursuing my B.Sc. at Webb Institute. In my free time, I enjoy watersports and hanging out with friends. This website is a central hub of research, ideas, and personal projects I felt like sharing.
My research interests are in the design optimization of lifting surfaces for marine applications. These structures include hydrofoils, propellers, turbines, struts, and energy saving and energy harvesting devices.
The hydrodynamics of high-performance vessels are particularly challenging due to increased susceptibility to cavitation and ventilation phenomena. Furthermore, since fluid loads scale with speed-squared, the deflections of the structure can be significant enough where their impact on the hydrodynamic performance must be considered. This is called fluid-structure interaction or hydroelasticity.
Some materials like composites have directional stiffness, or material anisotropy, that can be tailored by the designer to achieve a desired shape under load. Composites offer many benefits such as high strength-to-weight ratio, passive load-dependent shape adaptivity due to material anisotropy, corrosion resistance, and the potential for self-healing technology and embedded fiber Bragg grating sensors. They can also have improved fatigue life, enhanced cavitation performance, and reduced lifetime life-cycle cost.
What happens when we combine hydrodynamics and composite structures? In-flight shape can be carefully tuned to achieve hydrodynamic and structural efficiency for a given operating envelope.
Most of the projects listed below are based on academic research or personal projects. Click the links to find out more.
This group experimental work investigated ventilation boundaries of a PVC surface-piercing foil.
Here are some resources that I have found useful.
A lot of what I do is related to computer-aided design for marine lifting surfaces, which has resulted in the development and mastery over certain software design tools. If you are interested in using them, check out the software page. Alternatively, if you have an application with which you think I can help, shoot me an email. I am open to discussing collaborations or consulting through Supercritical Research LLC depending on my workload.