AAE graduate student wins student research paper award
An AAE Ph.D. student won one of the two 2021 Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) Student Research Paper Awards.
Sven Gustafson was the primary author on the winning paper, “Quantifying microscale drivers for fatigue failure via coupled synchrotron X-ray characterization and simulations.”
All the papers considered were written as a result of acquiring synchrotron data at CHESS. Cornell University’s state-of-the-art synchrotron radiation facility is one of only a few high-intensity X-ray sources in the United States.
The work for Gustafson’s paper was a two-part experiment, the first at CHESS, and used high resolution X-ray experiments to investigate the internal behavior of a high temperature aerospace material used in jet engines. The experimental results were compared to results of computer simulations to investigate the behavior of an internal feature, which is known to be a common place for material failure initiation, Gustafson said.
The material used in the work was a nickel-based superalloy that is used in the hot sections of gas turbine engines.
“This work contributes to the knowledge of surrounding the causes of component failure within the engine, potentially leading to engine failure,” said Gustafson, a student in Elmer F. Bruhn Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Michael Sangid’s research group.
Sangid was the principal investigator on the project, supported by the National Science Foundation under CMMI 16-51956, and supervised the work. Gustafson conducted much of the data analysis and wrote the manuscript. Wolfgang Ludwig, Paul Shade, Diwakar Naragani, Darren Pagan, Phil Cook, Can Yildirim and Carsten Detlefs also contributed to the work. Naragani is an AAE alumnus and former student of Sangid’s.
Gustafson’s work already had been recognized by two separate synchrotron sources.
He has been invented to present the winning paper’s research during the Science Talks session of the CHESS Users Meeting on June 8.
“I am honored to be able to receive this award and would like to thank all of my co-authors and collaborators who made the study possible,” Gustafson said. “I look forward to future experiments and am excited to delve into new and developing sciences made possible by high energy X-ray sources.”