News 📰

Learn more from Zipline engineer Gustavo Fujiwara and our test site team about the design changes we've made and about our tests under extreme temperatures to ensure our P2 Zips can deliver under any circumstance.

"When snowy and icy roads are too dangerous to drive and someone has an emergency requiring a life-saving product, that’s when people need us the most." - Gustavo Fujiwara

https://www.flyzipline.com/newsroom/stories/articles/the-wild-wild-nest-cold-weather-drone

NASA/AIAA/SAE utilize Fujiwara's Work as Experimental Test Case Data for the Icing Prediction Workshop (IPW) at the International Conference on Icing of Aircraft, Engines, and Structures in Vienna, Austria

World's leaders in aircraft icing got together at the SAE International Conference on Icing of Aircraft, Engines, and Structures held in Vienna, Austria (June 20-22, 2023) to present their computational predictions of ice shapes submitted to the 2nd Icing Prediction Workshop (IPW-2) from tests run at the NASA Icing Research Tunnel (IRT), published in the Journal of Aircraft article by Fujiwara et al.

Gustavo Fujiwara awarded dissertation fellowship

Gustavo Fujiwara of Seattle, Washington, has been selected as a recipient of a 2019 Dissertation Fellowship from The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, the nation's oldest and most selective collegiate honor society for all disciplines. Camarinha Fujiwara is one of only ten recipients nationwide to receive the $10,000 fellowship. 

Fujiwara wins SAE Doctoral Engineering Scholarship

UW Aeronautics & Astronautics Ph.D. student Gustavo Fujiwara won one of only two 2018 SAE Doctoral Engineering Scholarships. This scholarship recognizes and provides financial support to students pursuing doctoral degrees in engineering who demonstrate strong academic achievement and leadership skills. The total of 36 graduate and undergraduate scholarships were awarded from a pool of over 2,500 applicants.

Says Fujiwara, “I think winning this scholarship is linked to my prior participation in the SAE Aero Design competitions as an undergrad. This experience was very valuable in giving us the opportunity to experience a real-world design challenge simulating a typical aircraft development program from conceptual design to flight testing. It also gave us leeway to try unconventional approaches to aircraft design and innovate with multidisciplinary design optimization algorithms that helped us adjust to the changing mission and constraints of the competition.” Indeed, his undergraduate team from the University of Sao Paulo, participating over several years, won first place in both the national and international competitions, secured the NASA Systems Engineering Award for Best Aircraft Design, and broke the competition’s record for heaviest payload.

Fujiwara currently works with A&A Professor and College of Engineering Dean Michael Bragg and A&A Professor Eli Livne in the field of Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization (MDAO) applied to aircraft design. Their research targets ways to improve the design of future-generation aircraft by developing a more integrated optimization framework to ultimately increase aircraft fuel efficiency. 

Gustavo Eidji Camarinha Fujiwara Receives 2018 Phi Kappa Phi Love of Learning Award

Gustavo Eidji Camarinha Fujiwara of Seattle, Washington, recently was awarded a Love of Learning Award from The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, the nation's oldest and most selective collegiate honor society for all academic disciplines. Fujiwara is one of 100 recipients nationwide to receive the award.

Fujiwara, graduate student at University of Washington, will use funds from the award to complete Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics.

NASA Ames Honor Award: Performance Adaptive Aeroelastic Wing Team 

Award given to research team investigating novel passenger aircraft configurations to improve fuel efficiency and reduce environmental impact through Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) of flexible morphing wings.

Aerospace America - AIAA Paper Competition Winners

Portrayed in Aerospace America magazine - November 2017 edition for winning AIAA student paper competition.

https://www.aiaa.org/docs/default-source/uploadedfiles/publications/aerospace-america-november-2017.pdf?sfvrsn=8dda67b5_0

Fujiwara Again Wins AIAA Best Paper Award

Congratulations to Gustavo Eidji Camarinha Fujiwara, a PhD student in the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, for winning the AIAA AVIATION 2017 - Best Student Paper Award. AVIATION is a national conference organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) - world's largest technical society dedicated to the global aerospace profession. A panel of judges selected Fujiwara's paper titled, "3D Computational Icing Method for Aircraft Conceptual Design", presented in Denver, CO. The paper contributes to improving aircraft design and aviation safety by incorporating aerodynamic and icing effects in early aircraft design stages. This is the second year in a row that Fujiwara has received the Best Paper Award at the AIAA AVIATION conference. 

Fujiwara Awarded de Karman Fellowship

Congratulations to Gustavo Eidji Camarinha Fujiwara, a PhD student in the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics who has been awarded the Josephine de Karman Fellowship. He was one of only eight students selected in a highly competitive process from a pool of about 400 applicants from universities nation-wide. The de Karman fellowship was established in 1954 by Theodore von Karman, a world renowned aeronautics expert, to recognize and support outstanding academic achievement by students who reflect Professor von Karman’s high standards.

Fujiwara awarded UW Graduate School LSGSF

Congratulations to UW A&A doctoral student Gustavo Eidji Camarinha Fujiwara, who has been awarded a UW Graduate School Latino/a Scholars Graduate School Fellowship (LSGSF) for the 2016-17 academic year. Gustavo has been recognized for his academic research, and for service that demonstrates his strong commitment to Latino/a communities. This fellowship is administered by the UW Graduate School Graduate Opportunities & Minority Achievement Program (GOMAP) , and Gustavo will become part of the GO-MAP Graduate Diversity Fellows cohort. 

Wing Ice Accretion Test showcased on NASA's Social Media

Nasa Glenn's Instagram showcases a time lapse of an icing wind tunnel test performed in one of the wing designs from my MS thesis project.

This video clip illustrates how ice builds up on the leading edge of a swept wing in the NASA Glenn Icing Research Tunnel. The video was created from time-lapse images recorded over 29-minutes of ice build-up. The ice formation is highly three-dimensional and was acquired as a part of a large research effort at NASA focused on swept-wing icing and aerodynamics.
Photo credit: NASA/ Quentin Schwinn 

https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/aeronautics/icing/

Aerospace America - AIAA Paper Competition Winners

Portrayed in Aerospace America magazine - November 2016 edition for winning AIAA student paper competition.

https://www.aiaa.org/docs/default-source/uploadedfiles/publications/aerospace-america-november-2016.pdf?sfvrsn=414b0283_0

Aerospace America - AIAA Paper Competition Winners

Portrayed in Aerospace America magazine - October 2016 edition for winning AIAA student paper competition.

https://www.aiaa.org/docs/default-source/uploadedfiles/publications/aerospace-america-october-2016feaa9a2d3493456bac4ca50989392eef.pdf?sfvrsn=a8d497af_2

PhD candidate Gustavo Fujiwara wins AIAA AVIATION 2016 Best Student Paper Award

Congratulations to Gustavo Eidji Camarinha Fujiwara, a PhD student in the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, for winning the AIAA AVIATION 2016 - Best Student Paper Award. AVIATION is a national conference organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) - world's largest technical society dedicated to the global aerospace profession. A panel of judges selected Fujiwara's paper titled, "Computational and Experimental Ice Accretions of Large Swept Wings in the Icing Research Tunnel", presented in Washington, D.C.. The paper contributes to improving aircraft design and aviation safety by understanding the aerodynamic impact of ice accretion on the wings of big passenger aircraft.

Wing Design on the front page of NASA Icing Research Website

NASA's front page for Aeronautics Icing Research showcases one of my wing designs used in icing wind tunnel tests to help understand how ice builds up on large swept wings and their impact on aerodynamic performance and safety.
This was part of a multi-year collaborative project between NASA, FAA, ONERA, the Universities of Illinois and Washington, where NASA spent $1 million dollars to build 3 wing models I designed during my master's thesis project to reproduce the ice accretions that would be obtained on different sections of a passenger aircraft wing, known as the 65-% scale Common Research Model (CRM65), but with the size constraints of existing icing wind tunnel test sections. 

https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/aeronautics/icing/

NASA Group Achievement Award: Adaptive Aeroelastic Wing Shaping Control Team

Group Achievement Award (GAA) - Is an award given to either a group of Government employees or a group comprised of both Government and non-Government personnel for an outstanding accomplishment through the coordination of many individual efforts which have contributed substantially to NASA’s mission, with explicit consideration given to: (1) the quality of results and the level of impact on NASA programs or operations; (2) effective management of cost and schedule; (3) customer satisfaction; (4) team growth and capacity for future contribution; and (5) additional credit for development of innovative approaches, use of and contributions to lessons learned data banks, and/or success in responding to unforeseen crises.

https://www.nasa.gov/intelligent-systems-division/division-awards/

Invited Speaker at NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division

Adaptive Aeroelastic Wing Shape Optimization for High-Lift Configurations

This work presents the development of a 3D aerodynamic analysis tool to be used in an aeroelastic framework for multidisciplinary optimization of a flexible wing with variable camber continuous trailing-edge flaps (VCCTEF) in high-lift configurations, such as those encountered during takeoff and landing. In order to allow fast computation for optimization purposes and still capture nonlinear aerodynamic phenomena such as stall and maximum lift coefficient, a hybrid 3D aerodynamic formulation was developed by combining linear vortex lattice method with nonlinear lifting-line theory, utilizing 2D viscous sectional aerodynamic data. A two-variable "decambering" approach was employed to match both lift and pitching moment coefficients from the 2D data, using a multivariable Newton-Raphson iterative scheme. Results showed to successfully predict 3D nonlinear aerodynamic characteristics of experimental data for a straight wing, including the lift, the stall progression along the wing span, and the decrease in pitching moment experienced in high angles of attack due to stall, while maintaining low computational cost. Next steps include coupling a structural code to the developed aerodynamic tool to allow static aeroelastic optimization of flap deflections for high-lift flexible wings. This work is sponsored by NASA ARMD Fixed Wing project as part of the Adaptive Aeroelastic Shape Control (AASC) research area under the Aerodynamic Efficiency sub-project.

https://www.nas.nasa.gov/pubs/ams/2014/08-06-14.html

Fujiwara wins U.S. DOT (Department of Transportation) - Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship

The Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program (DDETFP) awards fellowships to students pursuing degrees in transportation-related disciplines (PDF or HTML). This program advances the transportation workforce by helping to attract the nation's brightest minds to the field of transportation, encouraging future transportation professionals to seek advanced degrees, and helping to retain top talent in the U.S. transportation industry.

Team Keep Flying wins SAE Aero Design World Series of Aircraft Design Competition and NASA Systems Engineering Award

Team 'Keep Flying' from Polytechnic School of University of Sao Paulo, Brazil won all possible awards in the SAE Aero Design East 2009:

• 1st Place Overall / Elliott Green Award

• NASA Systems Engineering Award

• Heaviest Payload Honor Trophy

The competition was held in Marietta, GA and was co-sponsored by Lockheed Martin.