Welcome to the SOFIA Lab
The SOFIA Laboratory is part of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is directed by Professor Jeff D. Eldredge. We are interested in exploring a wide variety of phenomena that occur in fluid flows in nature and technology. The members of our group are investigating...
- Low-order modeling of unsteady aerodynamics of agile bio-inspired micro air vehicles.
- Microparticle manipulation by viscous streaming.
- The fluid dynamics of biological and biologically-inspired locomotion.
- Interactions of fluid flows with flexible surfaces.
- Transitional and turbulent hypersonic boundary layer flows.
- Vortex estimation techniques for autonomous control of formation flight.
- New computational tools for simulation of biomedical flows.
Though these topics are superficially diverse, they have an essential unifying principle: they are all unsteady flow phenomena. For example, a flying insect generates lift and thrust by the unsteady production of vorticity—the local rotation of the fluid—at the edges of its wings. An insect has an amazing mastery of its medium that we are only beginning to understand. By concentrating on the tools that natural selection has endowed, then perhaps we can develop new ideas for controlling small-scale aircraft. We pursue most projects in this curiosity-driven (but application-oriented) fashion.
