Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

Path Planning And Flight Control Of Drones For Autonomous Pollination, Chapel R. Rice

Masters Theses

The decline of natural pollinators necessitates the development of novel pollination technologies. In this thesis, a drone-enabled autonomous pollination system (APS) that consists of five primary modules: environment sensing, flower perception, path planning, flight control, and pollination mechanisms is proposed. These modules are highly dependent upon each other, with each module relying on inputs from the other modules. This thesis focuses on approaches to the path planning and flight control modules. Flower perception is briefly demonstrated developing a map of flowers using results from previous work. With that map of flowers, APS path planning is defined as a variant of …

Transverse Waves In Simulated Liquid Rocket Engines With Arbitrary Headwall Injection, Charles Toufic Haddad

Masters Theses

This work introduces a closed-form analytical solution for the transverse vorticoacoustic wave in a circular cylinder with arbitrary headwall injection. This particular configuration mimics the conditions leading to the onset of traveling radial and tangential waves in a simple liquid rocket engine (LRE). Assuming a short cylindrical chamber with an injecting headwall, regular perturbations are used to linearize the problem’s mass, momentum, energy, ideal gas and isentropic relations. A Helmholtz decomposition is subsequently applied to the first-order disturbance equations, thus giving rise to a compressible, inviscid and acoustic set that is responsible for driving the unsteady motion and to an …

Development And Analysis Of Onboard Translunar Injection Targeting Algorithms, Phillippe Lyles Winters Reed

Masters Theses

Several targeting algorithms are developed and analyzed for possible future use onboard a spacecraft. Each targeter is designed to determine the appropriate propulsive burn for translunar injection to obtain desired orbital parameters upon arrival at the moon. Primary design objectives are to minimize the computational requirements for each algorithm but also to ensure reasonable accuracy, so that the algorithm’s errors do not force the craft to conduct large mid-course corrections. Several levels of accuracy for dynamical models are explored, the convergence range and speed of each algorithm are compared, and the possible benefits of the Broyden and trust-region targeters are …

Propagation Of Periodic Waves Using Wave Confinement, Paula Cysneiros Sanematsu

Masters Theses

This thesis studies the behavior of the Eulerian scheme, with "Wave Confinement" (WC), when propagating periodic waves. WC is a recently developed method that was derived from the scheme "vorticity confinement" used in fluid mechanics, and it efficiently solves the linear wave equation. This new method is applicable for numerous simulations such as radio wave propagation, target detection, cell phone and satellite communications.

The WC scheme adds a nonlinear term to the discrete wave equation that adds stability with negative and positive diffusion, conserves integral quantities such as total amplitude and wave speed, and it allows wave propagation over long …

Nonlinear Acoustics Of Piston-Driven Gas-Column Oscillations, Andrew William Wilson

Masters Theses

The piston-driven oscillator is traditionally modeled by directly applying boundary conditions to the acoustic wave equations; with better models re-deriving the wave equations but retaining nonlinear and viscous effects. These better models are required as the acoustic solution exhibits singularity near the natural frequencies of the cavity, with an unbounded (and therefore unphysical) solution. Recently, a technique has been developed to model general pressure oscillations in propulsion systems and combustion devices. Here, it is shown that this technique applies equally well to the piston-driven gas-column oscillator; and that the piston experiment provides strong evidence for the validity of the general …