AAE student earns PhD scholarship award
AAE student Xin Liu received the Ph.D. Research Scholarship Award from American Society for Composites.
The scholarship research grant program is for formally enrolled Ph.D. candidates in engineering or science whose dissertation research is focused on some aspect of composite materials. Liu’s research is on the performance of textile composite structures considering the manufacturing defects at subscales.
“It is a great honor to be awarded by ASC, and I am glad my work is recognized by this composites community,” Liu says. “Also, this is a huge encouragement for me to keep pursuing my career goal, which is to become faculty in a U.S. university.”
Liu joined AAE Professor Wenbin Yu’s Multiscale Structural Mechanics group in 2014 and received his master’s in 2016. He has continued to work with Yu as a Ph.D. student.
Liu has developed several tools based on a software called “SwiftComp,” a powerful multiscale constitutive modeling software developed by Yu. Some of Liu’s software development work is to integrate SwiftComp into Nastran for his sponsor, and that work will improve the efficiency of their current workflow and give more accurate predictions of the performance of airframe structures.
“One of the values in my group is ‘To strike for balance between practicality and rigor,’” Liu says. “For me, it means my work should not only be published in a paper but also can be directly used to solve real engineering problems. I’d like to thank my advisor Prof. Yu for sharing this research philosophy with me as well as his patient guidance and continued support.”