Professor Martin Skote

Airbus Professor of Landing Systems Engineering

Centre for Structures, Assembly and Intelligent Automation

Contact Professor Martin Skote

Areas of expertise

Aeronautical Systems
Aerospace Structures
Computational Fluid Dynamics

Background

Professor Martin Skote joined Cranfield University as Airbus Professor of Landing Systems Engineering in September 2018. Prior to his current position, he was an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, with a research focus on turbulence, flow control and computational fluid dynamics. He was also Cluster Director at the University’s Energy Research Institute for a research team comprising of 15 research staff. During his ten years at the University, he attracted around £2.0M in research grants from industry and government funding bodies and graduated 7 PhD students as sole/main supervisor.

Before taking up his academic position in Nanyang Technological University, Professor Skote worked for the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, developing a numerical simulation code for air pollution dispersion simulations in collaboration with the National Environment Agency. His PhD in turbulence was awarded (2001) from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in his native country of Sweden.

Current activities

The goal at Cranfield University is to build a Centre for Landing Systems Engineering which will focus not only on the mechanical/electrical/hydraulic aspects of landing gear but also consider the landing system as a part of a much larger ecosystem including airport infrastructure and air traffic management, together with all the future innovate and disruptive technologies such as autonomous taxiing and intelligent landing.

Modern aircraft design has led to lighter fuselage and wings, as well as quieter engines. The development of landing gear, however, is lagging due to that technological improvements of other aircraft parts cannot be directly transferred to the landing gear (e.g. the use of composites), partially because of its unique requirements and harsh operating conditions. In addition, airports have reached their maximum capacity and the option of occupying more space is no longer viable due to city growth together with environmental aspects such as noise and air pollution. Therefore, landing systems will need to be developed that allows aircraft to operate more fuel efficiently and in closer proximity to each other, both in time and space. This may mean changes to not just aircraft design, but also to novel operational ground technology and methods.

The new Centre’s research will look at ways to improve landing gear. It will focus on system design including noise, drag, vibrations, wasted fuel-burn, brakes, shock-absorbers, joint leakage, tyre material, composites and sensors together with network communications.