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PhD topics on trajectory optimization
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tudor1608:
Hello everyone,
I'm a young aerospace engineer specialized in flight dynamics and I recently decided to start my PhD research on trajectory optimization. I'm working as a flight dynamics engineer for about 3 years during which I developed and validated a full 6DoF simulator for space related applications. My activity was based exclusively on trajectory analysis and simulation and having that covered, I'm looking for a potential PhD topic idea on trajectory optimization.
Two of my future projects at work include activities related to launch systems and vertical landing demonstrators and I was thinking of linking my PhD research to these subjects.
Conclusively, I'm asking you guys, can you give me some ideas on topics worth researching on?
Thank you,
Tudor
Mondagun:
I don't have ideas for specific topics in this area, but back when I was in university a general strategy for finding research topics that I always found useful was the following: read through recently published theses and papers and look for a section 'Recommendations for Future Work'. Also whenever you see a sentence like 'The assumption was made that ...' in a thesis/paper, then it's worth asking yourself 'Is it really obvious that this is a valid assumption?' If it's not, then a deeper investigation into that assumption sometimes turns out to be an excellent research topic.
jacob.a.englander:
Hi,
I lead a small group called the Global Trajectory Optimization Lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. My group does optimization software tool development and mission trajectory optimization for many concept studies and the Lucy mission.
I would be happy to talk to you about topics ideas. Perhaps that is best done by email though. PM me if you are interested.
Sincerely,
Jacob Englander
P.S. Our tool, the Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator (EMTG) is open source and you can find it at the below link. However I don't think the open source version is compilable anymore because some of our third-party libraries changed. We are trying to release our latest internal version soon. EMTG is our medium-fidelity large-scale optimization tool. Goddard maintains another tool called the General Mission Analysis Toolkit (GMAT) that is flight fidelity and more useful once you have some sense of what the design will look like. GMAT is also free and open source.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/emtg/
tudor1608:
--- Quote from: Mondagun on 05/27/2017 05:25 pm ---I don't have ideas for specific topics in this area, but back when I was in university a general strategy for finding research topics that I always found useful was the following: read through recently published theses and papers and look for a section 'Recommendations for Future Work'. Also whenever you see a sentence like 'The assumption was made that ...' in a thesis/paper, then it's worth asking yourself 'Is it really obvious that this is a valid assumption?' If it's not, then a deeper investigation into that assumption sometimes turns out to be an excellent research topic.
--- End quote ---
Thank you for replying, I was thinking of that myself and now that I hear this from you as well, I will definitely consider it.
tudor1608:
--- Quote from: jacob.a.englander on 05/27/2017 05:55 pm ---Hi,
I lead a small group called the Global Trajectory Optimization Lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. My group does optimization software tool development and mission trajectory optimization for many concept studies and the Lucy mission.
I would be happy to talk to you about topics ideas. Perhaps that is best done by email though. PM me if you are interested.
Sincerely,
Jacob Englander
P.S. Our tool, the Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator (EMTG) is open source and you can find it at the below link. However I don't think the open source version is compilable anymore because some of our third-party libraries changed. We are trying to release our latest internal version soon. EMTG is our medium-fidelity large-scale optimization tool. Goddard maintains another tool called the General Mission Analysis Toolkit (GMAT) that is flight fidelity and more useful once you have some sense of what the design will look like. GMAT is also free and open source.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/emtg/
--- End quote ---
Thanks a lot for your reply. I've already PMed you.
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