Rosalind and John J. Redfern Jr.,’33 Endowed Chair in Aerospace Engineering, and Aerospace Program Director
Director, Center for Mobility with Vertical Lift (MOVE)
Email: fgandhi@rpi.edu
Phone: 518-276-3244 (work), 814-321-8030 (cell)
- PhD 1995, University of Maryland (Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center)
- Prof. Gandhi has been at RPI since 2012 after 17 years on Penn State’s Aero faculty (where he was Deputy Director of Penn State’s VLRCOE)
Rotorcraft aeromechanics and advanced rotary-wing configurations (including high-speed compound/coaxial helicopters and tilt-rotors, variable-RPM rotors, swashplateless rotor helicopters, and multi-copters). Prof. Gandhi’s research focuses on the use of design optimization, active and semi-active controls (for VTOL aircraft vibration reduction, aeroelastic and aeromechanical stability augmenation, noise reduction, and performance improvement), exploitation of control redundancy, and fault-tolerant control. Prof. Gandhi is one of the world’s foremost experts on reconfigurable vertical lift with extensive work on rotor span, chord, twist and airfoil morphing (including assessments of benefits, demonstration of implementation methods, and flight simulation studies), as well as full-aircraft reconfiguration (modular rotary-wing aircraft designs). He has also worked in the area of smart materials and structures (shape memory alloys/polymers, electro- and magneto-rheological fluid dampers and devices, piezoelectric actuators and active constrained layer treatments – for structural vibration reduction and damping augmentation; flexible skin designs for morphing wings; variable stiffness structures, multi-functional cellular structures, and multi-stable structures).