Biography

I have been passionate about sustainable flight since I started flying gliders in my teenage years, exploiting atmospheric convection phenomena above the french southwestern landscape.

After my graduation, I embarked on a PhD which studied the feasibility to find guidance from albatross soaring for the purpose of long-distance UAV flight. Albatrosses manage to harvest energy from the lower atmospheric boundary layer via dynamic soaring. This project lead to a post-doctoral research that focused on the feasibility to perform such flight on the leeward side of wind-exposed hills.

I later joined a venture-backed company in the field of Airborne Wind Energy (AWE). AWE aims at harvesting wind energy through the use of tethered kites, and as such displays many similarities with dynamic soaring. The extra kinetic energy harvested by albatrosses enables them to cover large distance and maximize their scavenging probability, whereas AWE-systems convert it into electrical power. As a conceptual design engineer, I outlined key performance trends of tethered aircraft and contributed to the sizing and analysis of a prospective utility-scale concept.

I joined TUDelft to investigate the potential of Hybrid-Electric Aircraft (HEA) over various classes of aircraft, as part of the CHYLA project (Credible Hybrid eLectric Aircraft). The project aims at outlining a landscape of opportunities and limitations for HEA over various aircraft classes, in order to understand which radical aircraft could fly first and how the maturation of the technology employed would drive their evolution towards different scales and wider usages. In order to gain that level of hindsight, the prospective performance of HEA with different technology combination will be determined, for various assumptions regarding technology levels available in 2035. Each aircraft class is characterized by top-level requirements, while on the technology side, each combination consists in a pairing between a powertrain architecture and a propulsion layout. Those radical technologies are accounted for by an adapted preliminary sizing tool developed at TUDelft over the years.

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