Engineering Commons^™

Effect Of Aerogel On The Thermal Performance Of Corrugated Composite Sandwich Structures, Jacob Dillon Chess

Master's Theses

Current insulation solutions across multiple industries, especially the commercial sector, can be bulky and ineffective when considering their volume. Aerogels are excellent insulators, exhibiting low thermal conductivities and low densities with a porosity of around 95%. Such characteristics make aerogels effective in decreasing conductive heat transfer within a solid. These requirements are crucial for aerospace and spaceflight applications, where sensitive components exist among extreme temperature environments. When implemented into insulation applications, aerogel can perform better than existing technology while using less material, which limits the amount of volume allocated for insulation. The application of these materials into composites can result …

Micro-Nozzle Simulation And Test For An Electrothermal Plasma Thruster, Tyler J. Croteau

Master's Theses

With an increased demand in Cube Satellite (CubeSat) development for low cost science and exploration missions, a push for the development of micro-propulsion technology has emerged, which seeks to increase CubeSat capabilities for novel mission concepts. One type of micro-propulsion system currently under development, known as Pocket Rocket, is an electrothermal plasma micro-thruster.

Pocket Rocket uses a capacitively coupled plasma, generated by radio-frequency, in order to provide neutral gas heating via ion-neutral collisions within a gas discharge tube. When compared to a cold-gas thruster of similar size, this gas heating mechanism allows Pocket Rocket to increase the exit thermal velocity …

A Computational Fluid Dynamics (Cfd) Analysis Of The Aerodynamic Effects Of The Seams On A Two-Dimensional Representation Of A Soccer Ball, Allen R. Rohr

Master's Theses

Most major sports today use a dedicated ball or projectile with specific shape, size, and surface geometry, except for soccer. Over the history of the sport, the surface geometry and design stayed relatively unchanged, sewn together using 32 pentagonal and hexagonal panels. However, recent innovations in panel designs differ substantially from the traditional 32 panel ball. The effects these new designs have on the aerodynamic characteristics of the ball have remained largely unknown, even with the influx of experimental research completed in the past decade. Experimental studies have been broad in scope, analyzing an entire ball in wind tunnels or …

Investigating The Effect Of An Upstream Spheroid On Tandem Hydrofoils, Joel Tynan Guerra

Master's Theses

This thesis documents a series of three dimensional unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes CFD simulations used to investigate the influence of an upstream prolate spheroid body on tandem pitching hydrofoils. The model is validated by performing separate CFD simulations on the body and pitching hydrofoils and comparing results to existing experimental data. The simulations were run for a range of Strouhal numbers (0.2-0.5) and phase differences (0-π). Results were compared to identical simulations without an upstream body to determine how the body affects thrust generation and the unsteady flow field.

The combined time-averaged thrust increases with Strouhal number, and is highest …