Academic Lead - Professor Mahdi Azerpeyvand

Mahdi Azarpeyvand is a Professor of Aeroacoustics and Aerodynamics at the University of Bristol. He held a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship position between 2011-2016 and was a member of the Rolls-Royce UTC at the University of Southampton (2003-2011), and the Acoustics group at the University of Cambridge (2011-2013). He joined the University of Bristol in 2013 to establish a new aeroacoustic team. He currently leads the aeroacoustics team at the University of Bristol with over 20 members. He is also currently acting as the academic lead for the UoB Wind Tunnels and the UoB representative to the National Wind Tunnel Facilities. His research is focused on experimental and theoretical aeroacoustics and development of passive/active techniques for reduction of aerodynamic noise. His research is supported by the RAEng, EPSRC, Royal Society, Horizon 2020, CleanSky, and industry (Aircraft Research Association, Embraer, GE, Atomic Weapon Establishment, Vestas). Professor Azarpeyvand has attracted over £6M towards his research and £2.2M for equipment and build of the UoB multi-purpose aeroacoustic facility. His current research activities include: airfoil noise, jet noise and jet installation effects, propeller noise, UAV/UAM aeroacoustics, turbulence interaction noise, porous treatments, micro surface treatments, active flow control, noise propagation effects, etc.

Dr Desmond Lim

Dr Desmond Lim is a Lecturer in Experimental Aerodynamics. He previously held an RAEng UK IC fellowship to investigate scalar dispersion and turbulent diffusivity in indoor spaces. Prior to joining the University of Bristol, he was a postdoc at the University of Southampton and a research scientist in the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD degree from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2020, where he was funded by the Nanyang President’s Graduate Scholarship to develop advanced image-based flow diagnostics for the analysis of supersonic jet flows. His research and teaching interests include scalar dispersion, mass transport, flow control, wall-bounded flows, jets, propellers, and the development of advanced flow diagnostics.

Dr Djamel Regzui

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Dr Djamel Rezgui is a Senior Lecturer in Aerospace Engineering with over 16 years of research experience in rotorcraft dynamics, aeroelasticity, aerodynamics and aeroacoustics. His research interests extend to studying the aeroacoustics of novel multi-rotor aircraft configurations and nonlinear dynamics of oscillating aero systems. He worked closely with Leonardo Helicopters within the AgustaWestland UTC (2008-2012) on active rotor systems, leading to the first application of Continuation Methods for certification of production helicopters. Rezgui is a founding member of the UK Vertical Lift Network and he is the UoB PI on the EPSRC funded project (MENtOR) developing new multibody modelling framework for novel rotorcraft t configurations. Rezgui also has a wide experience of collaborating on research programmes with world-class academic and industrial partners, funded by the ATI, EU and the EPSRC. He has been involved in collaborative research funding from Leonardo Helicopters, Airbus, ARA, BAE Systems, Innovate UK (WINDY, DAWS), CleanSky2 (SilentProp, TailSurf) and EPSRC. 

Dr Nick Zang

Dr Nick Zang graduated from Nanyang Technological University Singapore with Bachelor and Ph.D in Aerospace Engineering, where he worked on the fundamental aspects of flow dynamics in jets, vortex-rings and fluid-structure interactions. In 2018, he joined the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic research group in Bristol and has since worked as a post-graduate researcher and then a lecturer with the Aerospace department in Bristol. His research focuses on understanding of the aerodynamically generated noise mechanisms from aerofoils, cylinders and proprotors (in novel propulsion system) as well as the development of efficient noise reduction techniques. Besides the primary research work, he is also deeply interested in development and application of data-driven methods to fluids and aeroacoustics.  

Dr Beckett Zhou

Dr. Beckett Zhou is a lecturer in aeroacoustics in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. His research vision is to develop multi-fidelity methodologies to enable efficient aerodynamic and aeroacoustic simulation and design optimization, with strong synergies with experiment. The over-arching goal is to enable the use of these methods in the early stage of an aircraft design cycle to help investigate novel noise reduction concepts, unconventional aircraft configurations, and explore previously uncharted design spaces. As such, his current research focuses on forging a strong synergy between numerical simulation, optimization, and experiment, so that such integrated framework can be used in the quest for low-emission and low-noise design concepts required for future flight. His past and current research topics include optimal porous trailing edge design for noise minimization, noise reduction via adjoint-based shape optimization, multi-fidelity broadband noise minimization, jet noise simulation and minimization, and machine learning for turbulence modelling. Since 2015, Dr. Zhou has been one of the principal developers of the open-source SU2 software package for multi-physics analysis and design, leading the development effort in aeroacoustic prediction and design optimization. Active users of the SU2-CAA solver include NASA, Embraer S.A. and a number of research groups in academia.