Dr. Stevan Van Heerden

Biography

Stevan van Heerden is an aeronautical engineer and lecturer in Aerospace Engineering at the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow. His current appointment includes serving as a research fellow at the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre focused on Aeronautics Propulsion Thermal Power Engineering at Cranfield University. His main academic and professional interests revolve around the conceptual design of sustainable civil transport aircraft and related systems. Throughout his career, he has worked closely with major UK and European aerospace companies to identify and advance holistic, system-level solutions to the most significant technical impediments facing the commercial aviation industry. His PhD is in Aerospace Engineering from Cranfield University, and he holds an MS in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology, where he was a Fulbright scholar. Additionally, he has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria and years of experience in the industry, focusing on aerodynamics and flight control. His research interests, although highly interdisciplinary, are unified by themes such as conceptual aircraft design, development, analysis, and optimisation of airframe propulsion systems, as well as technical-economic assessment of novel efficiency-enhancing technologies at the subsystem level. He aims to significantly advance and accelerate the development of sustainable aerospace solutions by employing deterministic and non-deterministic design methods alongside physics-based multi-domain systems modelling techniques. His work is characterized by the development of methods that aid aircraft manufacturers in identifying 'evolvable' aircraft family designs well before their initial entry into service.

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