Ognjen Ilic Receives DARPA Young Faculty Award

ME Benjamin Mayhugh Assistant Professor Ognjen Ilic is a recipient of this year's Young Faculty Award (YFA) from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Ilic’s team will receive up to $1,000,000 over the course of three years for the project topic "Deployable Radiators for Small, High Power, Low Earth Orbit Spacecraft.” 

The YFA program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior faculty positions in academia and equivalent positions at non-profit research institutions, and expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) and National Security challenges and needs. The award will give Ilic the opportunity to develop new materials and structures for highly efficient heat rejection in space. Spacecraft, especially those in low earth orbit (LEO), are exposed to a wide range of thermal loads, but the popular small satellite platforms like CubeSats struggle to dissipate onboard heat because of their compact size. The LEO spacecraft are of growing interest in various commercial and defense applications, such as navigation, imaging, and communication. Ilic’s team of graduate students and postdocs will combine computer modeling and simulations with nanofabrication and characterization to understand coupled thermal, optical, and structural material interactions in ultrathin and lightweight composites that will form the backbone of new spacecraft radiators. 

“This is a very exciting, high-impact problem to enable thermal management of small spacecraft," said Ilic. "The structures that need to be developed must be strong, stiff, and highly thermally conductive while remaining very thin and lightweight. The team and the facilities we have at the University of Minnesota puts us in an excellent position to tackle this multi-disciplinary problem.”