Engineering Commons^™

Simulation Of A Configurable Hybrid Aircraft, Brandon Bartlett

Master's Theses

As the demand for air transportation is projected to increase, the environmental impacts produced by air travel will also increase. In order to counter the environmental impacts while also meeting the demand for air travel, there are goals and research initiatives that aim to develop more efficient aircraft. An emerging technology that supports these goals is the application of hybrid propulsion to aircraft, but there is a challenge in effectively exploring the performance of hybrid aircraft due to the time and money required for safe flight testing and due to the diverse design space of hybrid architectures and components. Therefore, …

Development Of A Cubesat Conceptual Design Tool And Implementation Of The Eps Design Module, Sean K. Nogrady

Master's Theses

This thesis is the product of an effort to develop a CubeSat Conceptual Design Tool for the California Polytechnic State University CubeSat Laboratory. Such a tool is necessary due to inefficiencies with the current conceptual design process. It is being developed to increase accessibility, reduce design time, and promote good systems engineering within CubeSat development.

The development of the architecture of a conceptual design tool, the core user-interface element, and the completion of a module for the electrical power subsystem is the focus of this thesis. The architecture is built around different modules to design different subsystems that work in …

Cultivating Creativity In Aerospace Systems Engineering To Manage Complexity, Kenneth Lucas Dodd

Master's Theses

In recent decades, complexity in aerospace programs has been increasing, leading to large budget and schedule overruns. Many of the risks of complex system development can be attributed to the inadequacy of linear methods when applied to nonlinear domains, i.e., oversimplification in a program amplifies the amount of risk produced when a system behaves unexpectedly. Effectively managing complexity involves responding to the various sources of complexity, whether it appears in the objective behavior of the system itself or in the subjective behavior of the people developing it. Thus, the engineering of complex systems requires nonlinear modeling methods of the system …

A Method For Visualizing The Structural Complexity Of Organizational Architectures, Jacob Michael B. King

Master's Theses

To achieve a high level of performance and efficiency, contemporary aerospace systems must become increasingly complex. While complexity management traditionally focuses on a product’s components and their interconnectedness, organizational representation in complexity analysis is just as essential. This thesis addresses this organizational aspect of complexity through an Organizational Complexity Metric (OCM) to aid complexity management. The OCM augments Sinha’s structural complexity metric for product architectures into a metric that can be applied to organizations. Utilizing nested numerical design structure matrices (DSMs), a compact visual representation of organizational complexity was developed. Within the nested numerical DSM are existing organizational datasets used …