Center for Hydro & Aero

 

We Invent Technologies that will Create Jobs

 CHACenter for Hydrodynamics & Aerodynamics

CHACenter for Hydronautics & Aeronautics

CHACenter for Hydraulics & Aeraulics

Thank you for flying with us, Ingenuity

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory early adopter of digital wind technology for ensuring flight safety of Mars helicopter Ingenuity. Excerpt from NASA-JPL Ingenuity Preflight Press Conference April 9, 2021 Moral of the story: just relax on a beach in Sardinia, watch...

Boeing Early Adopter of Pixelated Wind Technology

In a press release made on May 11, 2021, Boeing showed interest in adopting pixelated wind technology from our laboratory to test autonomous aerial mobility vehicles. Pending the adoption of the Boeing SuperHornet by the Swiss Confederation, Boeing will commit to...

Making Aerodynamic History

In 1928, Caltech inaugurated its 10-ft wind tunnel, the very first in Southern California. It was inspired by Prandtl's wind tunnel in Göttingen, built in 1909. Theodore von Kàrmàn, who had been Prandtl's doctoral student, was appointed director of the Graduate...

Helping NASA Enable Urban Air Mobility

NASA CAS (Convergent Aeronautics Solutions) has setup a working group to delineate the agency roadmap in the field of Urban Air Mobility in adverse wind and weather conditions. Our laboratory joined the two-day brainstorming session in beautiful Columbus, Ohio on Feb...

1 MCHF for Smart Winds to Certify Drones

HES-SO has been awarded her first BRIDGE Grant as project leader. The goal is to create real environments in which to test and certify drone safety. Our laboratory will be working with Prof Petros Koumoutsakos from ETHZ, who pioneered Machine Learning in fluid...

WindShaper on the HES-SO Annual Report

Photo: Nicolas Righetti.Photo: Nicolas Righetti.Photo: Nicolas Righetti.

Expand Your Horizons

Sixty girls age 11-14 were introduced to the wonderful world of air mobility and drones. The day was orgaized by fiteen student volunteers, with the support of our laboratory and WindShape. The goal was to generate awareness among to technical and scientific fields.

NVIDIA Machine Learning Director Promotes WindShape Technology

Animashree (Anima) Anandkumar,  director for NVIDIA Machine Learning Research and professor at Caltech, promotes WindShape technology for enabling innovative machine learning in real environments. Her speech was given at the Royal Society of London showcasing World's...

Helvets in Tokyo

WindShape was invited by the Swiss Confederation to showcase their technology at Japan's No 1 Technology event, CEATECH 2019. They had to brave mother Nature elements (Hagibis Typhoon) in order to be ready for the event on October 15. On stage, Nicolas Bosson flies a...

WindShape CEO is Switzerland Digital Shaper

Guillaume Catry was named among the 100 most influential people in Digitial Switzerland. https://labs.letemps.ch/interactive/2019/digital-shapers/portrait-guillaume-catry.html Guillaume was also featured on the front page of the HES-SO University of Applied Sciences...

Bullet Woman – 126.5 km/h World Record

Fastest woman-powered vehicle on the planet - 78.6 mph / 126.5 km/h ! Bravo to Ms. Ilona Peltier and her team from IUT-Annecy. Congratulations to the scientists from NeuralConcept for the shape, as well as the students in our lab and at WindShape for the aerodynamics....

Le Grand JD, Switzerland No 1 Youtuber, New Video about our WindShaper and Wind Turbine Technology

  Le Grand JD, Switzerland No 1 Youtuber, paid us a visit this summer. The filming was part of the SIG Vitale Program (Systèmes Industriels de Genève), which has funded our our research to improve the efficiency of wind turbines. The project relies on the use of...

WindShape on Swiss Television

WindShape, HEPIA, and HES-SO are featured in this documentary on Swiss Televison about Switzerland as Home of Drones....

Flyability Elios 2 is here

  Elios 2 from Flyability was launched this week. It was tested for aerodynamics performance in our laboratory using a WindShape facility.Antonino Sidoti, R&D leader at Flyability, was at AUVSI - Xponential showing proudly the new product, while he was in our...

Invited to Chicago AUVSI – Xponential to Talk about the Weather

Our lab and WindShape have been invited to share their thoughts about assessing drone (UAS/UAM) performance in adverse weather conditions at AUVSI/Xponential, the annual international conference on Unmanned Vehicle Systems (Chicago, April 29 - May 4 2019). The...

WindShape Instrument among World’s Top Research Facilities

Caltech features its major research facilities worldwide - including WindShape drone aerodynamics facility, the Higgs Boson detector (CMS) at LHC (Geneva), the Hawaï Keck telescopes, the space telescope NuSTAR (aimed at black holes), and many others....

WindShape partners with New York

WindShape, a startup from our lab, in partnership with the New York State UAS Test Site, TruWeather Solutions and the NUAIR Alliance, used industry-leading micro-weather stimulations to test the impact of wind on the air worthiness and performance of various types of...

Simone Origone @ Mach 0.25

Simone Origone is speed skiing World Champion 2019. He was in our wind tunnel a few months ago for the little tweaks needed to be at the top. The speed world record could not be beaten as the track had to be shortened because of rough conditions.

WindShape @ CES 2019

WindShape, a startup from our laboratory at HES-SO, has been invited by Switzerland to showcase its wind & weather technology for drones at CES 2019 in Las Vegas (January 8-11). WindShape is being supported by the State of Geneva, House of Switzerland, and the...

Let it Snow

hepia and WindShape were at WSL Laboratory for Avalanches and Snow Research SLF to test out the feasibility of running a WindShaper at cold temperatures (-10 degrees Celsius) and seed dendritic snow (produced artificially by SLF) on a free-flying drone.

WindShape at NCCR Robotics Day

WindShape (a startup from our lab at HES-SO Geneva - hepia) was invited at NCCR Robotics, where the top robotic technologies in Switzerland were showcased. National Counselor, Philippe LEUBA, had a chance of witnessing the caldron of innovations, in particular those...

WindShape @ BostonGlobe-MIT-Harvard HUBWeek

WindShape  (a startup from our lab at HES-SO Geneva - hepia) was invited by Swissnex-Boston to showcase its wind & weather facility in Boston during HUBWeek 2018 - an innovation festival that was started 4 years ago by MIT, Harvard, and The Boston Globe among...

Snowboarding/Skiing Aerodynamics is back!

It is snow season again. The French Ski Federation is back in the wind tunnel for rebooting his/her skiers and snowboarders.   Manon Petit Lenoir  Marie Bauchet, Paralympic Gold Medalist

HydroContest

The Swiss Team from HES-SO Fribourg wins the light boat competition. HydroContest is an international student competition organized by Hydros.ch, to sensibilize younger generations to energy efficiency concepts in marine transportation. Students from Fribourg...

senseFly eBee X is here

In the last year, our laboratory has setup a state-of-the-art wind tunnel bench for developing the now-named senseFly eBee X. The experiments were run in the historical aeronautics-grade wind tunnel at ETHZ. The extensive campaign and long hours paid off and resulted...

New York 2018 Symposium – Weather Impact on Drones

We have been invited as panelists on the drone Weather Impact session for the 2018 New York UAS Symposium on Sept 11-12, 2018. Other colleague panelists will include Dr. Bill Mahoney, NCAR Associate Director and Director of the Research Applications Laboratory...

XXI Century Aerodynamics

At the International Symposium on Flow Visualization at ETH Zürich (June 2018), Streamwise, Vectoflow and WindShape (a startup from our lab at HES-SO Geneva - hepia) showcased their technology and gave us a glimpse on how aerodynamics will be done in the future.

WindShape at World Economic Forum with Swiss President Doris Leuthard

On June 24-26 2018, WindShape (a startup from our lab at HES-SO Geneva - hepia) was invited by House of Switzerland to showcase its technology at the World Economic Forum (WEF) first Drone Innovators Newtwork workshop. Switzerland President Doris Leuthard was master...

Swiss Drone Volière

WindShape (a startup from our lab at HES-SO Geneva - hepia) has been invited by the Swiss Confederation and the State of Geneva to demonstrate Swiss leadership in drone technology, along with ten other major swiss drone manufacturers (senseFly, Flyability, Wingtra,...

A Home for WindShaper 1 – First Drone Wind & Weather Facility in the World, by WindShape Ltd

It is in many ways the wind tunnel of the 2020s (Dr Thomas ROSENBAUM, Caltech President) The place is the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the setting is an open space in the Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories at Caltech (GALCIT), created in 1928 to house...

It is in many ways the Wind Tunnel of the 2020s.

To: The Caltech Community From: Thomas F. Rosenbaum Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and Professor of Physics Date: December 7, 2017 Re: 2017 Year-End Message What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end...

Speed skiers at 250 km/h

Speed Skiers from the Spain national team and the Belgium national team were tested today at 250 km/h. In the picture, Ricardo Adarraga from the spanish national team has been testing his latest technologies and positions. His objective for the 2017-2018 season is to...

Inside the McLaren Racing Wind Tunnel

Cédric Michel-Grosjean, EPFL student, has been working at McLaren Racing Technology for his Master's thesis. While the work conducted during this activity is highly confidential, it allowed Cédric to live a lifelong dream. Because of his passion for the sport, Cédric...

Flying women

Women world cup ski jumpers from the French Skiing Federation flew in the wind tunnel today. Athletes included french star Julia Claire.

Tour de France star, Romain Bardet, in the Wind Tunnel

Romain Bardet and the AG2R team trained in the wind tunnel before the 2017 edition of the Tour de France. These tests were done in collaboration with our longstanding client and collaborator, the French cycling equipment manufacturer Mavic.

Water Drone with Acoustic GPS

Luca Bardazzi, Bachelor student at HES-SO, designed, built and tested a complete underwater drone, capable of swimming around without any tether, thanks to the acoustic GPS technology developed by Norvegian company, Water Linked. Luca spent three whole months in...

River Rover

  In the context of a project on behalf of the Environmental Directorate of the Canton de Vaud (CH), an autonomous floating vehicle (River Rover) was developed by our laboratory in order to perform a 3D temperature mapping of rivers (for the sake of fish survival...

21st Century

Aerodynamics

Real Wind & Weather Test Facility

State-of-the-Art

Flow Diagnostics

PIV, LDV, Hot Wire, High Speed Imaging

Disruptive

Technologies

Aeronautical, Biomedical, Mechanical, Nautical

THEY TRUST US

SOME NUMBERS

STARTUPS

PATENTS

CITATIONS

Flavio Noca, PhD