Digital Commons Network^™

Byu Rocketry: 2025 International Rocket Engineering Competition, Barry Creighton, Tyson Butterfield, Haylee Sevy, Brian Bodily, Max Coverston, Bryant Neuvert, Sam Bridge, Matt Taylor, Caleb Fears, Andrew Mcdonald, Tj Neyman

Utah Space Grant Consortium

BYU Rocketry will compete in the 2025 IREC competition near Midland, Texas in in the 30,000 ft commercial motor category. The 10 ft and 76 lb. rocket, Escalante, is a tribute to the red rocks of southern Utah and is our next step on the staircase of progress as we attempt to go higher and faster than ever before.

Gasrats Cubesat Transparent Antenna Payload, Ethan Wayland, Tyler Day, Jaret Riggs

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The Get Away Special Radio and Antenna Transparency Satellite (GASRATS) is a technology demonstration CubeSat designed and built by the USU Get Away Special Student Satellite Team. The project involves a state-wide outreach program and has been accepted for NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative

International Rocket Engineering Competition, Ryan Lewis, Nick Woolsey, Wyatt Daugs, Brandon Williams, Hagen Walker, Ava Wilkey, Alex Nielson, Jared Jones, Ryan Johnson, Ethan Baer, Mike Wendell, Weston Fausett

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The Intercollegiate rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) challenges teams to design, build, and launch a high-powered rocket to a target altitude of 10,000 feet while recovering all components, Our team must integrate propulsion, avionics, recovery, and payload systems within strict safety, budget, and design constraints, demonstrating proficiency and innovation in rocketry.

Lunar Landscaping: Designing A Berm-Building Robot For Nasa Lunabotics, Vincent Banh, Anthony Bolda, Nathaniel Bruns, Brycen Cheney, Samuel Friel, Najman Husaini, Wyatt Jones, Reagan Maughan, Jacob Wilson, Joseph Youngblood

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The goal of the NASA Artemis missions are to establish long-term human presence on the moon. This year's NASA Lunabotics competition tasks teams with building robots capable of traversing and landscaping in a simulated Lunar terrain to gather data on Lunar construction. The competition goal is to construct a robot capable of building a berm out of regolith simulant. A diagram of the competition layout is shown in Figure 1.

Cubesat: Structure, Berk Mair, Korbin Burton

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Design, prototype, redesign, test, and fabricate the best 3U structure for the Utah Tech CubeSat to contain and protect the payload and necessary subsystems.

Cubesat: Communications P.A.R.R. Earth Station, Adam Dimaio, Patrick Robanske, Braden Williams, Ryley Horrocks

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Designed and prototyped developed an autonomous earth station with RF tracking and SatNOGS integration to enable reliable satellite communication for environmental monitoring.

Real-Time Control System For Hybrid Rocket Performance Analysis, Leonardo Yucra, Taylor Trujillo, Morgan Britton, Ben Albert, Steven Dipani, David Lunde

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The Mechanical Engineering Department at Weber State University is creating a high-temperature materials testbed using hybrid rocket technology for the Miller Advanced Research and Solutions Center. This technology provides enhanced safety and controllability through a control valve, which regulates oxidizer flow to achieve a stable mass flow into the combustion chamber.

300-900 Mhz Midband Array Design For The Lunar Farside Technosignatures And Transients Telescope, Daniel A. Kemp, Jamie A. Frei, Caleb S. Edmunds, Karl F. Warnick

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The Lunar Farside Technosignature & Transients Telescope (LFT3), planned as an ultra-high frequency (UHF) phased array near the lunar antipode, is introduced as a pioneering mission capitalizing on recent advancements in analog beamforming. LFT3's midband array specifically leverages a described analog beamformer to achieve critical baseline measurements, enabling observations of astrophysical phenomena free from terrestrial interference. The authors describe the development of a wideband, low-power analog beamformer suitable for lunar-based radio astronomy, evaluating the primary architectures: a combiner tree, Rotman lens, Butler matrix, Nolen matrix, and Blass matrix. Each approach is analyzed in terms of performance, complexity, reliability, and suitability …

Multiple Wavepacket Decomposition Of F404 Engine Military Jet Noise, Tyce W. Olaveson, Kent L. Glee

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Jet noise sources are challenging to measure directly due to the extreme environment. Inverse methods, such as acoustic beamforming, using data collected near these sources can be used to construct equivalent source models that accurately describe the acoustic radiation. However, generating these models for a complex source can require thousands of parameters for a complete description. To address this challenge, a multiple wavepacket decomposition is introduced, reducing the source model into a set of analytic wavepackets, which recreate the full-rank model. This paper provides an overview of the decomposition procedure and applies it to acoustic data collected near a T-7A-installed …

A Comparison Of Surrogate Modeling Techniques For Predicting Radial Turbomachinery Flow Fields, Chase Oliphant

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Radial pumps and compressors are used in various engineering applications, including rocket turbopumps, automotive turbochargers, refrigeration systems, etc. Several different physical effects, including viscous losses, flow separation, compressibility, and rotational dynamics, dominate the flow in a radial impeller. These effects make predicting the flow field in a radial impeller very difficult, requiring computationally expensive CFD. However, a majority of an individual flow field calculated using CFD is often not pertinent to a designer, who only requires information at certain positions within the flow field. This often results in most of the simulation data generated being unused. Accurately predicting the flow …

Bistatic Continuous Wave Radar Using Sdrs, Matthew Finger

Utah Space Grant Consortium

This paper describes a research project at Weber State University (WSU) to create a small-scale passive-bistatic radar (PBR) using a low-cost software-defined-radio (SDR). SDRs have improved (in terms of performance versus cost) to where an affordable, low-power, receive-only radar system may be used in suitable RF environments.

The initial effort will generate a PBR testbed. Controlled measurement campaigns will validate radar-signal processing algorithms using two-dimensional geometries with a controllable transmitted signal. Follow-on research will integrate a two-element phased-array antenna at the receive SDR.

Using Nasa Awe Observations To Investigate The Global Distribution Of Concentric Gravity Waves, Anastasia King-Brown, Ludger Scherliess

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Upward propagating atmospheric gravity waves (GWs) originating from various lower atmosphere sources can transport energy and momentum into the Earth's upper atmosphere. In the ionosphere, GWs produce traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs), generate electric fields, and appear to contribute to the seeding of equatorial plasma bubbles that have detrimental effects on navigation, communication, and surveillance systems. Despite their importance and decades of research there are still many open questions regarding the morphology and dynamics of gravity waves. Of particular interest are concentric gravity waves (CGWs), as they are the direct result of the coupling between lower and upper atmosphere . For …

Nitrogen Form Determines Lettuce Yield In Continually Replanted Systems, Noah J. Langenfeld, Bruce Bugbee

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Nitrogen (N) recycling is essential in closed root-zones for bioregenerative life support in crewed missions. Microorganisms recycle organic N forms from human waste into ammonium and nitrate for plant growth. We used lettuce as a model crop to examine yield under multiple N sources modelled from N recycling. Plants were grown in peat moss media adjusted to pH 6 or 7 for five repeated plantings in the same containers without replacing the media. A nutrient solution was used for both studies that contained N as either ammonium nitrate, ammonium, nitrate, urea, or microbial biomass from the N-fixing microorganism Azotobacter vinelandii …

A Simple Sonication Method For Generating Monodispersed Nanoparticles Of Hydrophobic Antioxidants, Kyle Jackson, David Britt, Yu Huang

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Various hydrophobic antioxidants remain unexplored for the treatment of space radiation and oxidative stress due to their inability to enter the cell without a drug delivery vehicle as their surface properties cause them to suffer from a poor solubility. In this paper you will find a recent breakthrough of a new method to create neat antioxidant nanoparticles free of any surfactant whatsoever vastly improving inherent solubility. These nanoparticles are synthesized monodispersed with a low polydispersity. This is even more suitable for astronauts then other generation methods, as the cocktail is without any solvent or surfactant which can have unknown effects …

Biosignature Analysis In Saline Environments Using The Microfluidic Organic Analyzers For Biosignatures (Moab), Andrew Pack, Parker Jenkins, Jungkyu (Jay) Kim

Utah Space Grant Consortium

This study examines amino acid stability in high-salinity environments to enhance biosignature detection technologies. Using both absorption spectroscopy and capillary electrophoreses (CE), we investigated the survivability of valine and serine in laboratory-created brines simulating those found on celestial bodies throughout the solar system. Our findings reveal a protective effect of brines on amino acids, with reduced degradation rates compared to control samples containing no salts. During the 12-day observation period, both polar and non-polar amino acids showed enhanced stability in high-salinity environments, though non-polar amino acids exhibited more pronounced benefits from this protective effect. Valine concentrations in saline conditions decreased …

Analysis Ready Aerospace Wing Assembly Reconstruction Using Parameterization, Brian Shawcroft, Kendrick Shepherd

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Accurate analysis of structures in the design process are often labor intensive and computationally expensive. Isogeometric analysis (IGA) provides potential to better connect the design through analysis process and converge to accurate results more quickly. Here, methods are proposed to help in the goal of automating the process of converting design geometry to an analysis suitable model for IGA. This is done by using tools previously built in combination with a motorcycle graph algorithm to extract quadrilateral layouts of the intended geometry. This method will be demonstrated by reconstructing and analyzing an airplane structure.

A Novel Modular Spherical Joint For Truss Robots, Ivyann O. Running, Simon Charles, Eli Francom, Bryce Parkinson, Adam Rose, Hunter Pruett, Larry Howell, Nathan Usevitch

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Truss robots and structures are beneficial for lunar missions because of their high strength-to-mass ratio. Even better are robots and structures that are highly modular, allowing the same materials to be rearranged to perform various tasks. The joints of these robots are what must be connected and disconnected to create different truss forms. Therefore, it is necessary to develop highly mobile, modular spherical joints that allow multiple truss elements to attach. Moreover, these joints must be resistant to the lunar regolith. Our contribution in this paper is the design of a new spherical joint and its application to an isoperimetric …

Development And Implementation Of Compact Let Joints For Origami-Based Deployable Arrays, Katie Varela, Luke Gardner, Spencer Magleby

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Lamina emergent torsion (LET) arrays are not area efficient and exhibit significant parasitic motion. This makes them unsuitable for use in highly compact applications such as origami-based deployable arrays. This work presents a compact variation of the conventional LET array which resolves these issues. A method for fabricating these compact LET arrays, or C-LETs, from carbon fiber-reinforced polymer is given. Deflection and stress models for C-LETs are shown, and initial steps taken toward validating these models. A prototype origami-based deployable reflectarray incorporating C-LETs demonstrates that they provide the desired motion while maximizing the usable area of the array.

Modeling And Optimization Of Mets: An Enveloping Tensegrity Structure For Adaptive Stiffness Control In Space Applications, Ammon E. Gallart, Jeffrey R. Hill

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Tensegrity structures, defined by rigid elements in compression balanced by tensioned members, offer lightweight, flexible solutions for adaptive space systems. Stiffness modulation is vital for space applications, such as reinforcing robotic arms, stabilizing astronaut suits, and supporting deployable structures in microgravity. Traditional systems often rely on heavy actuators or rigid components, limiting adaptability and increasing mass. This research presents the Multi-Stiffness Expandable Tensegrity Structure (METS), an enveloping tensegrity system designed to conform to spacecraft appendages and provide tunable stiffness without external power. Using control string actuation and unit cell optimization, METS achieves scalability and adaptability, validated through modeling, innovation, and …

Bi-Level Route Optimization And Path Planning With Hazard Exploration, Grant Stagg, Cameron K. Peterson

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Effective risk monitoring in dynamic environments such as disaster zones requires an adaptive exploration strategy to detect hidden threats. We propose a bi-level unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) monitoring strategy that efficiently integrates high-level route optimization with low-level path planning for known and unknown hazards. At the high level, we formulate the route optimization as a vehicle routing problem (VRP) to determine the optimal sequence for visiting known hazard locations. To strategically incorporate exploration efficiency, we introduce an edge-based centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT), which refines baseline routes using pseudo-nodes and allocates path budgets based on the UAV's battery capacity using a …

Dynamic Riskscapes For Prey: Disentangling The Impact Of Human And Cougar Presence On Deer Behavior Using Gps Smartphone Locations, Heather N. Abernathy, Mark A. Ditmer, David C. Stoner, Kent R. Hersey, Kathryn A. Schoenecker, Pat J. Jackson, Kristin N. Engebretsen, Julie K. Young, George Wittemyer

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

Prey species adjust their behavior along human-use gradients by balancing risks from predators and humans. During hunting seasons, prey often exhibit strong antipredator responses to humans but may develop tolerance in suburban areas to exploit human-mediated resources. Additionally, areas with high human activity may offer reduced predation risk if apex predators avoid such locations. This study examined mule deer Odocoileus hemionus behavioral responses to risks from humans and their primary predators, cougars Puma concolor, contextualized by differences in risk levels between study sites, individual risk exposure, and human habituation. We framed our investigation using three non-mutually exclusive hypotheses: (H1) …

Ability Of Strained C Atoms To Act As An Electron Donor, Mariusz Michalczyk, Wiktor Zierkiewicz, Steve Scheiner

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

There is a great deal of strain within the propellane and pyramidane hydrocarbon molecules. Quantum chemical calculations evaluate how this strain affects the ability of the bridgehead C atom to act as an electron donor in hydrogen, halogen, chalcogen, pnicogen, and tetrel bonds, despite the absence of a formal C lone pair or CC multiple bond. The strain induces the formation of a substantial region of negative electrostatic potential on this C atom which can attract the σ-hole of an electrophile. Each such molecule also contains an occupied molecular orbital that can be described as either a C lone pair …

All The Presidents' Papers, Kelly Rovegno, Abbie Chelsey, Mara Kenison

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

Prior to 2018, approximately 25% of University Archives material was available electronically (mostly published works cataloged in Sierra, 2% of collections had electronic finding aids)

Collaborative Research: Developing And Testing Innovations: Early Childhood Maker Literacies: Fostering Computational Thinking Among Navajo Youth And Educators, Kristin Searle

Funded Research Records

No abstract provided.

Transportation’S Influences On Wellbeing: A Literature Review And Scoping Framework, William Bouck, Patrick Singleton, Louis Alloro, Kim Clark

Curiosity

This study investigates the relationship between transportation and wellbeing: the conditions humans need to flourish at all levels. Using the results gleaned from our literature review of 44 articles, we found correlations linkages between transportation elements and components of physical, psychological, economic, and social wellbeing. These transportation factors affected overall wellbeing, not merely wellbeing during travel. We find that active travel, followed by public transit, are the best travel modes for wellbeing, and that congestion, pollution, and transport disadvantage harm wellbeing. Our findings also indicate that multimodal, people-focused infrastructure corresponds to higher wellbeing. Generally, the four areas of wellbeing we …

Cultivating Confidence, Curiosity, And Motivation In The Second Language Classroom, Janelle Carter

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This portfolio documents the author's journey through the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program at Utah State University, highlighting the evolution of their teaching philosophy and pedagogical practices through theoretical exploration, hands-on classroom experiences, and reflective practice. It details the integration of current research, collaborative learning, and innovative assessment strategies, such as self-created rubrics, to foster student engagement and agency in teaching German as a second language. Additionally, the portfolio includes a co-authored research study that examines the motivational factors influencing university students’ decisions to continue learning Arabic, French, and German. This study explores how personal, academic, and social …