Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

Lupa: An Excursion Vehicle For The Moons Of Mars, Shannon Kavanagh, Bo Lewis, Alex Odinamba, Joshua Mulhern

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Our team has designed a spacecraft and mission for exploring the moons of Mars. The Lithological and Ultraviolet Photometry Assessment (LUPA) excursion vehicle is capable of crew habitation, autonomous rendezvous, and in-vacuum sample collection all in support of a parallel Mars surface mission to be carried out in the year 2040. Our project's key focus areas revolve around orbital mechanics, space vehicle propulsion analysis, scientific exploration, and the management of various interconnected spacecraft subsystems.

Project Scrappie (Clear Constellation), Jacob Bertram, Jacob Britt, Bill Ngo, Mike Diesing

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Clear Constellation™ is a nationwide competition hosted by Rubicon® to combat the growing problem of space debris in Low Earth Orbit. Project Scrappie is our team’s solution to this problem. Scrappie is an autonomous apparatus will make use of Whipple shield technology to collide with debris at high velocities and effectively destroy the debris throughout selected orbital paths.

Lifting Flow Over A Cylinder As A Lift System, Kyle Mello

Symposium of Student Scholars

The goal of this project is to conceptually design a lift system consisting of rotating cylinders that may improve certain flight characteristics when compared to conventional wings for a typical two passenger airplane. The functions of flaps, ailerons, lift to weight ratio and structural responses are considered. The cylindrical model is developed within CFD simulation software such that it generates the same lift produced by the wings of a Cessna 172 wings at cruising speed. Incompressible flow theoretical solutions are initially shown to compare favorably with the computational predictions for elementary cylindrical designs.

The rotating cylinder aircraft generates the same …

Flying Wing Uav For Surveillance And Object Tracking, Kristen Padgett, Scott Semmelink, Jared Lasley, Paul Horne

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have become ubiquitous in recent years due to their adaptability and ease of use. Surveillance UAVs in particular have seen increased interest and usage by law enforcement, civilian security, surveying, and federal services. The increased interest has led to the development of UAVs with increased endurance and payload capacity. Further as many of the applications of surveillance drones involve heightened security requirements, an aircraft of domestic make is preferential to many organizations. With this demand in mind, Inspired Products, LLC put forth a request for assistance in the design and testing of a surveillance UAV. More …