CSEP Blogs

Could you briefly introduce your background and career to date?

I am a Naval Architect and Marine Engineer with a strong passion for hydrodynamic design optimization. My journey began at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), where I focused on enhancing energy efficiency and sustainability of vehicles in various domains. Before joining Imperial College London, I taught at Piri Reis University and completed two postdoctoral research projects at ITU and École Centrale de Nantes, developing computational frameworks for design optimization and engaging in multinational research efforts. Currently, I am involved in a joint project with CSEP and Brahmal Institute of Sustainable Aviation to further develop my skills while working towards a more sustainable future of aerospace. 

How does your work align with CSEP’s mission to support economic growth and long-term competitiveness?

At CSEP, I am responsible for conducting a comprehensive and evidence-based assessment of the UK aerospace sector, focusing specifically on the design, development and implementation of advanced, fuel-efficient aircraft technologies and operations. This assessment aims to provide actionable recommendations regarding the impact of these elements on the UK’s competitiveness and the potential for innovation within the industry. This focus is particularly crucial given the significant technological advancements required by the ambitious UK Jet-Zero strategy and international roadmaps aimed at achieving decarbonized and sustainable aviation. CSEP’s mission centres on identifying strategies to promote economic growth while maintaining the UK’s competitiveness. The fact that the aerospace sector is technology-driven, coupled with the presence of world-leading industrial players in the UK, underscores the importance of the sectoral review currently being conducted at CSEP. 

What part of your current research do you find most inspiring, and why?

As a member of a multinational research team, I focused on developing fundamental mathematical frameworks and computational methods to enhance the simulation-based optimization of vehicle designs, aiming to reduce their environmental impact. To speed up the optimization process, we are improving uncertainty estimation, which enables more reliable decision-making in assigning the next candidate and helps identify the most promising solutions more efficiently. This improvement is essential for an efficient design optimization, especially when working with limited, computationally expensive and inherently noisy data. It is inspiring to see how closely the theory aligns with expectations and how it contributes to the project compared to earlier versions. Each step generates new questions to explore, fuelling my passion for discovering more advanced solutions. 

What do you enjoy doing outside of work to relax and reset?

Definitely painting! Painting is a way of locating your identity in the universe, thinking, speaking and understanding through the endless layers of shapes and colours. It becomes a philosophical exploration, connecting us to broader questions of existence. It is like digging to find what you would like to see or what you are escaping from, without knowing where this ambivalent cycle will end each time. You begin with uncertainty—since you can’t predict what each session will reveal—but you possess a strong desire to explore. Through trials and challenges, this desire evolves into something unforeseen, which remains a mystery even to you, much like the journey of life itself. 

 

 

Read Meet the CSEP Team Series: Dr Hayriye Pehlivan Solak in full

What combination of skills and experiences best defines your journey as an aeronautical engineer?

I’m an aeronautical engineer — this means I am 10% electrical engineer, 30% mechanical engineer, 10% material scientist, 20% computer scientist, and 10% chemical engineer. And this is definitely one of those cases in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts.  I worked as engineer at Airbus for a few years before I started my doctoral research, and I joined Imperial a couple of years after.

What area of study is capturing your attention right now?

The problem that most interests me right now is understanding the impact that a warming atmosphere will have on future aircraft. This is the reverse of what we normally focus on (how aircraft emissions affect the climate, which of course is much more important!) and it is one that may have substantial practical implications as we develop more efficient aircraft. Very high efficiency is strongly linked to smooth operating conditions, and a very turbulent atmosphere will not help at all. The solutions I’m looking into need of advanced flight controls, which means my research now spans all the way from meteorology to embedded systems. I am very lucky to have many collaborators that are true experts on those areas.

What opportunities has CSEP provided for broadening your perspective in your field?

One of my current roles is to act as the director of the Brahmal Institute for Sustainable Aviation. This has been a fantastic opportunity to help shaping the research landscape at Imperial and beyond, and we have around 15 researchers now working on some of the hardest problems to achieve net-zero aviation. The institute challenged me to step outside the narrow confines of my research and explore the broader landscape of the aviation sector. The CSEP brought an opportunity to systematise that effort and look at the portfolio of technologies that have proposed for net-zero aviation from the point of view of their economic value to the UK, the policy bottlenecks that may impede their development, and the research that is still needed to make some of them work at scale.

Do you have a favourite paper, study, book or project that has influenced your career path so far?

The very first visit I made when I started at Imperial was to the site in Farnborough where Airbus was developing a solar-powered aircraft. This is an incredibly difficult problem: the wings need to be very large because the area needed by the solar panels, but there is still very little power coming from them to power the engines, so the aircraft has to be both extremely light and very aerodynamically efficient. The result is off the scales compared to any other aircraft! I tried to address some of those trade-offs with my very first research projects, which let me to develop new design and analysis strategies, which eventually shaped the rest of my academic career.

Read Meet the CSEP Team Series: Prof Rafael Palacios in full

Author: Professor Rafael Palacios

The UK is one of five countries in the world with the capability to build its own aeroplanes. As an island nation we rely on aerospace more than other countries. So aviation technology here has always developed at pace. We have the third largest sector in the OECD by market share, after the US and France and a healthy pipeline of startup ranging from nanosatellites to large lighter-than-air vehicles. And the operations of companies like Rolls Royce, BAE Systems and Airbus stand as symbols of the sector’s future potential.

The pressure to accelerate development in aviation

Today, the defining challenge for the industry is net zero and producing the technical solutions and new business models to make net zero flight a reality in the second half of this century. There is no realistic future without flight. So the aviation industry is under enormous pressure to accelerate the development of sustainable fuels and more fuel-efficient aeroplanes, and to ramp up investment to support the pace of technological progress.

Transitioning to net zero will also mean defining new ways of working. To electrify road transport, consumers must shift their perspective to buy electric cars. But the way fleets are financed in aviation is business-to-business and much more complex. So transitioning to net zero flight will only happen if the UK government intervenes positively, introducing the economic incentives to create new business models, with companies reacting to that policy environment.

Aerospace regulation can drive growth and competition

In other words, the way to reduce the environmental impact of aviation is regulation. It cannot be left to the market. The UK’s Aerospace Technology Institute and industry-led Jet Zero strategy demonstrate that both government and business accept this. Defining a regulatory pathway to net zero is a key focus of work supported by the Centre for Sectoral Economic Performance, with policy recommendations that will help drive economic growth and competitiveness in the UK’s aerospace industry.^[1]

Britain can make major gains in aerospace

We can be confident that the UK can make major gains in the sector in the coming decades. Aerospace engineering and innovation in the UK is thriving, whether it’s the Wing of Tomorrow made at Airbus or Rolls Royce producing the largest ever jet engine.

The UK is also pioneering new types of air travel, such as battery-powered air taxis. Imagine hopping on an air taxi from Heathrow to Gatwick to make a connecting flight or to finish your journey on the right side of London, avoiding road traffic and emissions. Vertical Airspace in Bristol is working on making that journey a reality.

Working towards new forms of sustainable aviation

The UK is rich with innovation in this area. Last November saw the flight100 project led by Virgin Atlantic, where a team of experts from Imperial and the University of Sheffield analysed a flight from London to New York to see if sustainable aviation fuel can be used with existing infrastructure while reducing carbon emissions. For these larger aircraft, it’s likely we will need to combine hydrogen with CO2 obtained from carbon capture to make e-fuels, a new form of sustainable aviation fuel.

These fuels are still very expensive, and in the medium-term we expect these fuels to be produced from biomass. Meanwhile, as we move to a hydrogen economy for uses where electric power is not possible, companies including ZeroAvia are developing hydrogen propulsion for smaller aircraft used in regional aviation. Given the UK’s expertise in AI and data science, we also need to see more innovative work applying these capabilities to accelerate development.

Partnership is essential for progress

There are also some areas with exciting potential, like the work Google and American Airlines have done to show that flying slightly different routes can reduce the climate impact of contrails. These trap large amounts of heat that would otherwise have left the earth’s atmosphere, and which might account for up to 35% of aviation’s global warming impact. Satellite analysis found the experiment reduced contrails by 54%, while only burning 2% more fuel.

We need to see more of this kind of strong partnership between academia, industry, government and finance. Our report will also show how we can put the right policy mechanisms in place to support this collaboration, from R&D and net zero to the business environment and access to investment. In the coming decade we have a golden opportunity to build, protect and capitalise on the UK’s aerospace capabilities. But we will only do this if we have a clear direction, informed by this research.

Professor Rafael Palacios is Director of The Brahmal Vasudevan Institute for Sustainable Aviation, a collaborative research centre at Imperial College for blue-sky thinking towards environmentally friendly aviation. He is a Professor in Computational Aeroelasticity as Deputy Head of the Department of Aeronautics in the Faculty of Engineering. He has been a consultant for Facebook and Airbus in the design of solar-powered aircraft. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

The Centre for Sectoral Economic Performance at Imperial College London investigates how to improve the competitiveness of the UK economy and drive economic growth. It is a joint initiative between Imperial’s Faculty of Engineering and the Imperial College Business School, bringing together the UK’s top engineers, scientists and economists with the UK’s science and technology industries to co-design globally competitive strategies for major global challenges such as net zero.

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/sectoral-economic-performance/

 

Read Supporting the UK’s strengths in aerospace will unlock growth in full