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Presentation: Shaping the Air: Aerodynamic Fluid Flow Control from Flying Vehicles to Smarter Cities

Speaker: Professor Yiyang Sun

Fluid dynamics governs the invisible forces that shape both our machines and our built environments, from the air flowing over an aircraft wing to the breezes that weave through city streets. In aerospace engineering, understanding unsteady aerodynamics is crucial for achieving quieter, safer, and more efficient designs, particularly under extreme flow conditions that lead to turbulence, noise, and structural stress.

A central challenge lies in controlling these chaotic flows. Active flow control provides a powerful pathway forward: by deliberately introducing small, well-designed disturbances, we can harness and reshape unsteady flows for improved performance.

Over the past few decades, modal analysis techniques have enabled us to distill the complexity of fluid dynamics into essential patterns, revealing the dominant instabilities, energy transfers, and input–output relationships within the flow. These insights not only deepen our scientific understanding but also guide the design of physics-informed control strategies.

This talk will demonstrate how these methods are applied in aerospace systems, such as cavity flows and high-speed jet interactions, where active flow control is already transforming aerodynamic performance.

Importantly, the same approaches can be extended to the built environment, offering new ways to analyze and influence airflow around buildings, enhance urban microclimates, and ultimately contribute to smarter, more sustainable cities.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Yiyang Sun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Syracuse University. She earned her Ph.D. from Florida State University (2017) and her B.S. from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (2012). Dr. Sun’s research bridges fundamental fluid dynamics and applied flow control, leveraging high-fidelity simulations, modal/non-modal analysis, and data-driven modeling to design quieter, more efficient aerodynamic systems. By uncovering the underlying physics of complex flows, such as nonlinear interactions and multiscale dynamics, her work advances physics-based control strategies with real-world applications in aerospace engineering. Dr. Sun is a recipient of the 2024 Young Investigator Program Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and was honored with the Amelia Earhart Fellowship during her Ph.D. studies in 2016.