Engineering Commons^™

Rasc-Al Large Scale Lunar Crater Prospector, Austin Arnold, Coleman Alvarez, Mark Suberu

Senior Design Project For Engineers

The purpose of this project is to design a conceptual layout of a lunar rover capable of exploring craters at the lunar south pole. The rover should be autonomous and capable of self-sustainment for at least one year in extreme cold and darkness. While determining the location and accessibility of water ice and other volatiles within the crater. This document will contain all information related to the team's conceptual design. Including research, component selection, electrical design, and mechanical design.

Lunar Rascals Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdcjzVMtzaI

Rapid Response Satellite Launcher, Nathan Jones, Joey Cosentino, Jayson Layton, Afek Adar

Senior Design Project For Engineers

Air launch to orbit is a new style or spacecraft where rockets are attached to a large aircraft and released at cruising altitude to then ignite and launch into space. Companies such as Virgin Orbit are using it as a cheap and efficient way to move satellite payloads into lower or upper Earth orbit. These styles of launchers can be designed to be much smaller than ground-launched spacecraft, reducing cost and weight of the launcher in comparison. With many private companies coming into the space and satellite industry, the design and manufacturing of these launchers have become a focus within …

Cosmic Object Space Management Operations System (C.O.S.M.O.S.), Riah Ivy, Tyler Bumpus, Gabriel Soter

Senior Design Project For Engineers

In the expansive realm of outer space, humanity has ventured into new territories, yet this progress is accompanied by challenges. Among the most significant challenges confronting space exploration today is the growing amount of space debris within low earth orbit. Satellites, spent rocket stages, and assorted fragments orbiting Earth present a considerable hazard to spacecraft and astronauts, and this issue is steadily worsening. For years, the task of remedying this orbital congestion has remained formidable and unresolved. This design provides a novel and innovative solution to this growing problem.

Experimental And Numerical Analysis Of Laminar And Transitional Flow Through Annular Corrugated Pipes, Joseph Russell Sargent

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents studies on pressure loss through annular corrugated pipes to determine a friction factor coefficient using nitrogen. Ten different corrugated pipes’ geometries were evaluated via testing and experimentation. The ratio of corrugation height to inner diameter varied from 0.233 to 0.333 and the ratio of corrugation pitch to inner diameter varied from 0.181 to 0.446. Nitrogen flow rates between 0.25 to 94.4 standard liters per minute were used, resulting in Reynolds numbers, based on the corrugated pipe inner diameter, from 100 to 23,000. The experimental set-up was validated using smooth-pipe pressure loss measurements and the derived friction factor …

State Omniscience For Cooperative Local Catalog Maintenance Of Close Proximity Satellite Systems, Chris Hays

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Resiliency in multi-agent system navigation is reliant on the inherent ability of the system to withstand, overcome, or recover from adverse conditions and disturbances. In large part, resiliency is achieved through reducing the impact of critical failure points to the success and/or performance of the system. In this view, decentralized multi-agent architectures have become an attractive solution for multi-agent navigation, but decentralized architectures place the burden of information acquisition directly on the agents themselves. In fact, the design of distributed estimators has been a growing interest to enable complex multi-sensor/multi-agent tasks. In such scenarios, it is important that each local …

Space Force - Inspection, Romualdo Cipro

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Our project deals with a common problem that is encountered with satellites in earth orbit or beyond. It is very common in space for there to be small collisions between satellites and foreign space debris, and it takes a lot of time and money to send a person out to repair the damage caused by the collision. Our goal is to develop a way to perform these repairs autonomously. We plan to develop a way to scan a satellite or spacecraft hull for damage using a robot and then repair the damage while still maintaining the material specifications required for …

Propulsion Heat Analysis Nuclear Trajectory Optimization (Phantom), Ana Clecia Alves Almeida, Jonathan Davis, Ryan Dippolito

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Interplanetary Travel requirements necessitate the use of increasingly complex propulsion systems. Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) is a cutting-edge concept that holds immense potential for the future of space exploration. By utilizing nuclear fission to heat a propellant and generate thrust, NTP offers the potential for unprecedented efficiency, enabling faster interplanetary travel and extended mission capabilities. A nuclear thermal rocket engine is a type of propulsion system that utilizes the heat generated by a nuclear reactor to heat and expel a propellant, typically hydrogen, at high velocities to produce thrust. The engine consists of three main subsystems: the nuclear reactor, the …

Space Force Spacecraft Hull Inspection: Creation Of A Process To Inspect, Compare, And Fault Detect On The Surface Of A Spacecraft Hull, Ethan Rainsburg

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Space Force Inspection design project aims to create a system for scanning the hull of a spacecraft, identifying any damage by cross-checking the new scan with a previous scan, and fixing any identified damage picked up by the scan. This project contains key objectives such as defining testable parameters for any given scanner, creating a repeatable process for comparing scans, and automating the process using open-source code and software. The ideal outcome for this project is to have the fully automated system implemented to a robot that is being designed and manufactured by a sister team. Some of the …

Inspection/Fault Detection Team, James Worrall

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Our project deals with a common problem that is encountered with satellites in earth orbit or beyond. It is very common in space for there to be small collisions between satellites and foreign space debris, and it takes a lot of time and money to send a person out to repair the damage caused by the collision. Our goal is to develop a way to perform these repairs autonomously. We plan to develop a way to scan a satellite or spacecraft hull for damage using a robot and then repair the damage while still maintaining the material specifications required for …

Gravity Fed Hopper Flow Of Bulk Solids For Lunar Isru, Jason Bendixen Noe

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

With the return to the moon in the decade of the 2020s, there has been a renaissance of lunar technology development and innovation. This has been particularly true for the area of lunar ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization). One key area in ISRU that has been neglected is lunar regolith storage hopper research. Many lunar regolith ISRU researchers use storage hoppers in their work but do not document the properties when designing the hoppers or do not have the information at hand. Because of this, hopper design and documentation are poorly understood, and more research is needed. Hoppers are vital for …

Efficient Connectivity Management And Path Planning For Iot And Uav Networks, Amirahmad Chapnevis

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores how to better manage resources in mobile networks, especially for enhancing the performance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-supported IoT networks. We explored ways to set up a flexible communication architecture that can handle large IoT deployments by making good use of mobile core network resources like bearers and data paths. We developed strategies that meet the needs of IoT networks and enhance network performance. We also developed and tested a system that combines traffic from several mobile devices that use the same user identity and network resources within the core mobile network. We used everyday smartphones, SIM …