Brenden Herkenhoff is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Mechanical Engineering Department who is doing research under Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian. Brenden began working in his lab during his undergraduate career and NMT through a design team project and proved to be a dedicated student and hard worker, going on to lead several designs and research teams. His research spans multiple areas of aerodynamics and drone design, often using bioinspiration. Brenden led a senior-level NASA MINDS team in 2021 focused on the design of a jumping lunar robot for lava tube exploration. This team placed second overall in the national competition against over 30 other teams and the systems engineering paper and presentation placed first. Some of his other research involves the design and development of an amphibious drone system, Venus-based solar drones, various energy harvesting techniques found in nature, along with bioinspired coloration studies for thermal benefits in Martian habitats as well as aircraft design.
In his senior year at NMT, he was selected as the Mechanical Engineering Department’s student researcher of the year, as well as NMT’s best engineer of the year, with 12 published conference papers in AIAA SciTech, Aviation, and Energy and Propulsion Forums and several poster presentations. Brenden also has received twice New Mexico Space Grant Consortium Fellowship from Fall 2021 to Spring 2022 and from Fall 2022 to Spring 2023, and AIAA Albuquerque Section Scholarship Award. As a result of this, he was admitted into the mechanical engineering department’s direct Ph.D. program and has been performing noteworthy research since. Brenden’s recent research revolves around the study of drag reduction and energy harvesting observed in nature (bioinspiration) and how he can apply these phenomena to various aircraft, more specifically drone design. Currently, he is performing research related to the coloration of both bird wings and monarch butterflies to study the aerodynamic effects of various color patterns. By testing various heated wing elements, Brenden was able to determine a black trailing edge provides a larger increase in overall flight efficiency in comparison to various other configurations, and he is currently working to understand what aspects of wing coloration help improve the survival rate of North American Monarch butterflies during their migration from Canada to Mexico. To do this he is not only analyzing the black portions of their wings, but also the characteristic white spots which he believes act as thermal regulators to prevent overheating during flight.
In addition to this, Brenden has been working for the Santa Fe-based Virtual Reality (VR) company, SciVista, for the last several months to aid in the development of a VR platform capable of presenting 3D designs in a virtual environment for other live attendees. To do this, he is learning an entirely new skillset and hopes to apply this to his research for drones. This will allow the virtual testing of various drone characteristics, as well as pilot training/practice in VR. Brenden also works part-time for NMT as a teaching assistant for the last several semesters as a way to improve his ability as well as aid undergraduate students. During Summer 2022 Brenden has worked for Sandia National Labs in the fluid thermal department during the summer to improve his knowledge base and apply what he learns to his research on thermal-based drag reduction.
