Join us for Professor Matthew Santer’s Imperial Inaugural online or in person.
There is no need to register to attend so please be sure to use the add to calendar button.
We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday 19 February!
Abstract
The size of structures designed to operate in space is fundamentally constrained by the size of available launchers. Deployable structures — which package tightly for launch and then deploy in space for operation — offer a means to address this problem. A recent successful example of this was the James Webb Space Telescope which used deployment to achieve a primary reflector with a diameter over two-and-a-half times greater than the non-deployable Hubble Space Telescope. Deployable structures are challenging to design and operate. They must be robust, lightweight, precise, and deploy as expected after enduring launch and the space environment.
Matthew Santer is Professor of Aerospace Structures in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London where he has been researching how some of these challenges can be addressed. In his inaugural lecture he will discuss how structural nonlinearity, optimization, origami, and tape measures (really) are influencing the design of novel deployable antennas and next-generation landers for extra-terrestrial bodies.
Biography
Matthew Santer is Professor of Aerospace Structures in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London. He is also a Co-Director of the newly-formed School of Space, Security and Telecoms. His research focuses on the analysis, design and optimization of structures for aerospace applications with novel and unexpected characteristics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He is a member and former chair of the AIAA Spacecraft Structures Technical Committee.
He graduated from the University of Oxford with an MEng in Engineering Science in 2000 and, following a period in the space industry, with a PhD in Structural Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2006. Following this he remained as a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge before joining Imperial College London in 2008.
