Aerospace – Page 2 – CA Work Experience Program

Day 6 – Drones

Today was a peacefully productive day. I sat on the terrace of the Hunt library all morning, worked away at my OpenVSP project, read some books, and admired the many birds. I have completed the rough models of my two airplane models: Cessna 210 and Atlantis OV-104. Below is a rough model of the Atlantis OV-104. I will be finalizing the models and creating my presentation tomorrow.

Later in the day, I met up with a Ph.D. student for a quick tour of his drone lab. The lab was filled with a wide variety of drones, ranging from hand-made to professional, from wood and Styrofoam to metal. It was really cool seeing just some of many possible aircraft models all displayed in one room. His research mainly focused on creating an algorithm via Matlab for designing, developing, and testing UAS flight paths. Other students in his lab worked on autonomous drones and creating an unmanned batterie changing station for quadcopters to allow for longer travel distances without increasing batteries size. On a side note, during the tour, I learned that you can “boil” Styrofoam to return it to its original shape after a crash and that a nice way to cut Styrofoam is by using a hot wire.

Day 4 – Wind Tunnels

Today was an exciting day. I continued to work on my airplane models, attended a meeting, explored another aerodynamics experimental lab, and saw a wind tunnel. The meeting was conducted to update a project’s members on each individuals status. The experimental group found some patterns in oscillations and experimented with utilizing different formulas to create a more accurate and representational model of the theorized. The computational group made changes to the code to allow for a 50% decrease in computational time.

In the aerodynamics experimental lab that I visited, there was a mini wind tunnel, artificial muscles, and more. I thought that the artificial muscle was pretty cool. It contracted by having air pushed through the surgical tubing. This artificial muscle was combined with a skeleton to give it the ability to throw an object.

Lastly, I got a small tour of the large wind tunnel at NC State. The wind tunnel and giant pressurized air tanks were adjacent to EB3. This circular wind tunnel sped up the air by releasing pressurized air into the tunnel and turning on a fan to continuously blow the air to sustain its speed. Because of the circular design of this wind tunnel, the air stays at the relative speed it was sped up too, decreasing the amount of energy needed to sustain it. It is easier to keep air moving than to speed up air from normal room conditions. Inside the tunnel, there are numerous screens streamline the air in the same direction. While each individual part of this equipment seems confusing, it is easy to understand when put together. A picture of the NCSU wind tunnel years ago is below.

Day 3 – OpenVSP and GitHub

For the full duration of work experience, I was given a task to make two aircraft using a 3D modeling program, Open VSP. I will be making a Cessna 210 and another of my choosing. The picture below shows the beginning stages of by Cessna 210 model. After completing the 3D models, I will be able to run a variety of tests to show the aerodynamics of each. The main challenges that I have found with this program are figuring out how to utilize the different operations, to be able to imagine parts of the 3D object in relation to other parts and to understand some terms. Terms include ellipsoid, tessellation, and CFD mesh.

In the afternoon, I attended a meeting with other Ph.D. students to understand how to use GitHub, which allows for a more reliable and more organized way of storing commits of code. We made several repertoires and experimented with branching, forking, cloning, merging, pulling. We soon discovered that GitHub, similar to other online collaboration programs, still has trouble merging different versions. We will be problem-solving tomorrow to decrease the likelihood of lost work due to this issue.