Eli Livne
Boeing Endowed Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

Active Flutter Suppression, a part of the group of flight vehicle technologies known as Active Control, is an important contributor to the effective solution of aeroelastic instability problems when they pop up late in the development of a new aircraft. If used from the start of the design process it is a key element in multidisciplinary design optimization that would lead to more efficient aircraft. The technology has been known and pursued for more than 50 years and yet only recently has it seen civil-aircraft acceptance with strict limitations by government certification authorities. While used in some cases on military aircraft, it has not been accepted for wide spread application by militaries around the world.

Because of its wide multidisciplinary nature and the tight interdisciplinary interactions involved, Active Flutter Suppression, part of the field known as Aeroservoelasticity, is, from a technical perspective, at the heart of aeronautics. The talk will describe key milestones, the state of the art, and key challenges in making this technology widely accepted with, potentially, a resulting major impact on aircraft design.

About the speaker...

Professor Livne holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in aeronautical engineering from the Technion, Israel, and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the UCLA. He served in the Israeli Air Force in various research and development roles, eventually founding its aeroelasticity / structural dynamic branch, which he led for ten years, working on the aeroservoelastic and design aspects of numerous aircraft systems. Among other responsibilities he was the head of the engineering team that brought the first F16s to Israel and he was in charge, for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, of the aeroservoelastic development of the Israel Aircraft Industries Lavie Fighter Jet.

After graduating UCLA Prof. Livne joined the faculty of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington in 1990. Over the course of his academic career, Prof. Livne has continued extensive collaboration with both industry and defense organizations. Highlights of these collaborations include structural and aeroelastic optimization and lightweight airframe design with Boeing Commercial Aircraft, contributions to the NASA High Speed Civil Transport project, and contributions to industry / government wind tunnel aeroelastic tests of highly nonlinear flight vehicle configurations.

Prof. Livne heads the airplane design education and research program at the University of Washington. With expertise in aeroelasticty, aeroservoelasticity, multidisciplinary flight vehicle optimization, aircraft design, aerospace structures, structural optimization, and structural dynamics, Professor Livne's research has been funded by NASA, the FAA, AFOSR, ONR, NSF, and by Boeing. He is a Fellow of the AIAA and currently, the Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA's Journal of Aircraft.