Funmilola Nwokocha is a PhD student in the Mechanical Engineering department at New Mexico Tech. She has a B.Eng. and M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering with specialization in industrial engineering and building services Engineering respectively from the University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. She also has an MBA (Production) from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. She has worked as a graduate research assistant and has several years of work experience in the manufacturing industry before starting her PhD.
She started her PhD journey at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Structures of NMT with Dr. Andrei Zagrai in Spring 2021. Her research interest is in structural health monitoring of space structures using electromechanical impedance (EMI). Her focus is on the use of piezoelectric sensors for measuring the EMI of space structures and how they are affected by the elements of the space environment. Spacecrafts are exposed to a variety of hazards when in space, some of which have led to failures of space missions, her research hopes to contribute to reduction of failed spacecrafts due to effects of thermal variations in space.
She is collaborating with Immortal Data LLC on developing a new generation of black boxes for space vehicles. Black boxes are used to record flight data on aircrafts in order to investigate accidents and to develop preventive maintenance measures. A portable, Arduino based impedance measurement unit would be used in a suborbital payload to measure the dynamic response of a fixed-free beam. The aim of the suborbital flight is to demonstrate the feasibility of the distributed flight recorder operation. Real-time impedance structural health monitoring is an important part of the flight testing, hence the potential of the impedance measurement unit to measure impedance signatures during flight, extract structural dynamic features from the impedance signature and communicate them in real time to the distributed flight recorder would be demonstrated. The most useful features of the dynamic response of a structure are the impedance signature peaks, therefore to extract the structural dynamic features from the impedance signature, an algorithm to obtain peak frequencies and amplitudes was developed. This suborbital flight is scheduled to be flown to space on December 02, 2022.
In her spare time, Funmilola volunteers at the New Mexico Science and Engineering fair. Together with her husband who is also a graduate student at NMT, Funmilola is raising two beautiful daughters.
