XD2 Lab

Extreme-Condition Dynamics & Design Lab — designing systems that operate near their instability limits

Top: grid motion in the ground frame — two flying wings in tandem, prescribed manoeuvre, follower 0.9 m behind, convecting 1−cos gust. Bottom: unsteady RANS at the same instant — wall Cp, vorticity in a side slice, and motion, lift, and gust histories. Moving overset grids, 2.7 M cells (two 0.67 M-cell wing grids, 1.3 M-cell background), re-assembled every step.

Featured

OversetGym

Gym-style environments on moving overset grids: aircraft that maneuver, interact through their wakes, and fly through gusts, simulated with unsteady RANS.

To be released.

Sicheng He

Sicheng He

Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

sicheng@utk.edu

Dougherty Engineering Bldg

Knoxville, TN 37996

Welcome

Our mission: To develop structured and differentiable representations of complex dynamical systems that enable scalable analysis, physical insight, and optimal design.

The XD2 Lab develops mathematical and computational frameworks to represent, interpret, and optimize complex nonlinear dynamical systems — with emphasis on engineering systems that operate near their instability limits.

Explore Our Research Meet the Team

Latest News

Sep 2026
Paper accepted at the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Representations for the Physical Sciences (RPS) in Paris.
Sep 2026
Paper “Hydroelastic Optimization of Submerged Composite Foils with Flutter and Ventilation Constraints” accepted in Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization — led by Galen Ng (UMich MDO Lab).
Sep 2026
Paper “Efficient Adjoint-based Design Optimization with Optimal Control” accepted in the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design.
Aug 2026
Paper “Eigenvalue- and Gradient-Aware Optimization for Small-Signal Stability via the Adjoint Method” published in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems — with Jianing Chen, Yan Li, and Daning Huang.
Aug 2026
Jason Le receives the UTK Scholarly Development Grant – Research Assistant (SDG–RA) Award — congrats!
Aug 2026
Congrats to Max Howell on accepting a position at Raytheon — an exciting next step!
Jul 2026
Rohit Kanchi to present at the prestigious NASA Ames Applied Modeling & Simulation Seminar on July 2.
Jun 2026
Paper “SurGE: Surrogate Gradient-guided Evolution for Co-design of Legged Robots with Parallel Elasticity” accepted at IROS 2026 — led by Yulun Zhuang and Yanran Ding (UMich).
Jun 2026
Rohit Kanchi wins 2026 AIAA Aviation MDO Best Student Paper Runner-Up (\$1,000) — paper.
Jun 2026
Congrats to Ben Melanson on accepting a position at Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) — important next step in his career!
Mar 2026
Paper “Training-Free Score-Based Diffusion for Parameter-Dependent Stochastic Dynamical Systems” accepted in Advances in Computational Science and Engineering — with Minglei Yang.
Dec 2025
Rohit Kanchi and Ben Melanson presenting at NeurIPS 2025!
Jul 2025
Seed grant from UTK AI Tennessee Initiative for AI research led by Vladimir Sobes (\$50K total, \$25K share).
Dec 2024
New lab website launched!
Aug 2023
Prof. He joins UTK MABE as Assistant Professor

Open Positions

Ph.D. positions available!

We are looking for motivated students interested in MDO, computational physics, scientific computing, and fluid mechanics.

Graduate students from MABE, EECS, ISE, and applied math at UTK are welcome to reach out.

View Details

Research Areas

Structured Representations

  • Time-spectral methods
  • Torus methods for quasi-periodic dynamics
  • Floquet stability theory

Operator-Theoretic Analysis

  • Resolvent analysis
  • Differentiable modal decompositions
  • Optimization-compatible reduced coordinates

Optimization, Control & Learning

  • Adjoint-based stability optimization
  • Multidisciplinary design optimization
  • Scientific ML for inference and design

XD2 Lab • University of Tennessee, Knoxville • Department of MAE