Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

The Aerodynamic Center Of Inviscid Airfoils, Orrin Pope

Utah Space Grant Consortium

A method for developing relations for C_L and C_m using general airfoil theory and conformal mapping without applying linearizing approximations such as the need for thin airfoils, small airfoil camber, or small angles of attack is shown. More accurate, and mathematically correct relations for the location of the aerodynamic center are obtained by accounting for the trigonometric and aerodynamic non-linearities lost in the development of traditional relations for the location of the aerodynamic center of airfoils. These more accurate descriptions for the location of the aerodynamic center are shown to be significant when predicting aircraft static stability.

Stem Summer Camp For K-6 Students At Uvu, Bonnie Andersen, Cyrill Slezak

Utah Space Grant Consortium

UVU offers an excellent academic summer program in the fields of Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics (STEM) specifically designed to engage and further students having completed grades 1-6. Program courses have been developed in close collaboration with experienced STEM endorsed Elementary school teachers and established university research faculty aligned with state curriculum standards. Engaging students within a community of motivated students and enthusiastic faculty in hands-on projects will develop critical thinking, content knowledge, and problem-solving skills.

Bipyrimidine Signatures As A Photoprotective Genome Strategy In G+C-Rich Halophilic Archaea, Daniel L. Jones, Bonnie K. Baxter

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Halophilic Archaea

• Experience high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation in their environments

• Demonstrate high resistance to UV • Are protected by pigmentation and efficient DNA repair

• Have high genomic G+C content

Halophiles And Biogeography, Bex Kemp, Adam Wolford, Bonnie Baxter

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Halophilic Archaea

•Halophilic archaea dominate the Earth’s many hypersaline environments such as Great Salt Lake (GSL)

• They are multi-extremophiles, tolerating not only salinity, but also desiccation and high levels of UV irradiation

• Halorubrum is a genus of Halophilic archaea with wide distribution around the Earth

• The distribution of Halorubum across space and time begs the question of the mechanism behind the biogeography.

Analysis Of Oxygen-Conserving Delivery Methods, Jason King, Lara Brewer, Soren Hoehne, Joseph Orr

Utah Space Grant Consortium

•Oxygen therapy is needed to help treat patients with a variety of medical conditions.

•Oxygen conservation methods can be used to deliver oxygen only during beginning of inspiration.

•This can provide the same medical benefits as constant oxygen delivery while using less oxygen and reducing costs.

•These conserving methods include intermittent flow devices and reservoir cannulas.

•Our goal was to optimize a pulse flow and reservoir cannula device for use in children age 5 years and under.

Utah State University Design, Build, Fly 2016-17, Matthew Nelson, Spencer Wendell

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Competition Requirements

•Folding Design

• Entire design must fold and stow in a tube.

• Four Missions

• Ground Test –The whole system, in stowed condition, must survive a drop onto concrete.

• Demonstration Flight –Short flight to verify capabilities.

• Speed Mission –Complete 3 laps with a payload of 3 pucks as fast as possible.

• Endurance Mission –Fly as many laps as possible in 5 minutes with 3 or more pucks.

Using Heart Rate Waveform Patterns And Frequency To Detect Postoperative Airway Obstruction, Anh Pham, Lara Brewer

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Hypoventilation has a high risk of happening during the first 24 hours after the initiation of opioids (drugs used for treating pain) in postoperative patients.

Current techniques to detect airway obstruction either have high false positive rate, delay indicator or ineffective cost.

Our solution is to build a reliable respiratory depression monitoring technique integrated from pulse oximeter waveform pattern signal and its frequency.

Combining Undergraduate Student Curriculum, Research, And Outreach: High Altitude Balloons And Rockets, Eric Davis, Russell Garner, Ryley Shingleton, Brittany Williams, Jason Sheetz, Kim Nielsen

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Student research is known to be a high-impact learning to participating students. At Utah Valley University, we are introducing a student-driven research paradigm where the research is integrated with the undergraduate curriculum and students form their own scientific hypotheses and design experiments to address the science objectives.

Extracting Dna From Salt: Using Picogreen To Explore Detection Limits, Joshua Webb, Luisa Rusta, Erin Tabish, Edgar Chavez, Brett Denney, Bonnie Baxter

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Biological materials surviving in modern halite (salt) on Earth may point to a method for detection of potential or former life in salt deposits on Mars. This project attempts to find an efficient method extracting cells and DNA from modern halite crystals to gain more insight into efficient method of extracting DNA from ancient salt. Our method considers the limitations of Mars Rover techniques in terms of reagents and simplicity. Halite was collected form the north shore of Great Salt Lake, Utah. Through direct experimentation, we designed a filtration system to isolate DNA from salt samples and refined this process …

The Space Survivability Test Chamber, Alexander Souvall, Benjamin Russon, Brian Wood, Gregory Wilson, Jr Dennison

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The Space Survivability Test Chamber (SST) provides an extensive, versatile, and cost-effective system for pre-launch verification and assessment of small satellites, system components, and spacecraft materials. A UNSGC Faculty Research Infrastructure Grant was awarded a for the purpose of making improvements to enhance and extend the capabilities of the SST. Since the SST was brought online in August 2016, several externally funded projects have been completed and collaborative projects with The University of Tsukuba (Japan) and Logan High School (Utah). Many more projects are forthcoming and the capabilities of the SST continue to be improved and developed for the future.

Design Of In-Flight Instrumentation To Characterize A Hybrid Thruster, Stephen Whitmore, Hybrid Thrustuer Usip Team

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The NASA Undergraduate Student Instrument Project (USIP) is a program with the goal to provide hands-on flight project experience to undergraduate programs, and to fly new technology in space to improve Technology Readiness Level (TRL).

Survey Of Mars South Polar Craters For Subsurface Water Ice, John Armstrong, Michael Hernandez, Mars South Pole Survey Team

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Mars' polar ice caps experience seasonal sublimation, the process in which ice skips a liquid state, and moves directly from solid ice to gaseous vapor. Through geospatial analysis, we identify craters, observe geomorphology, then search for correlations with temperature and albedo to study the climate interaction between the surface and atmosphere in a search for liquid water.

The Utah Robotic Mining Project, Jonathan Davies, Utah Mining Robotics Team

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Autonomous robotics technology is improving at an exponential rate, and has the potential to be the largest leap in technology since the invention of the personal computer. Robot Operating System (ROS) [1] is a catalyst in the development of fully autonomous robots. With a large community of developers and many resources available, it allows researchers to focus their time on implementing fully autonomous systems on their robotic platform, instead of spending time developing algorithms.

This research focuses on the development of an autonomous robotic system using ROS, with the purpose of competing in the NASA Robotic Mining Competition [2]. While …

Undergraduate Examination Of Pollutant Aerosols In Earth's Atmosphere, Matthew Toon, Tyler Weenig, Zach Collins, Fred Davis, Christopher Maughan, Kyle Strong, Kim Nielsen

Utah Space Grant Consortium

Air pollution can result from both natural and human-caused actions. Natural pollutants may result from events like: forest fires, volcanic eruptions, wind erosion, natural radioactivity, etc. Human pollutants can result from: toxic emissions from vehicles or manufacturing plants, burning fossil fuels, household or farming chemicals released into the air, second hand smoke from tobacco users, etc.

Pollution can obviously have an extremely negative effect on the air quality that we as humans, as well as all living creatures, breathe and depend on for life. Pollution can also negatively impact water and soil by introducing toxins into these resources needed for …

Hapcad, Prototype For The Gaspacs Aeroboom Deployment, Jan J. Sojka, Get Away Special Team

Utah Space Grant Consortium

This past summer the Utah State University Get Away Special Microgravity Research Team tested several of their prototypes on high altitude balloons. They had a total of four balloon launches were they collected a variety of data. Their primary purpose was to test their passive stabilization mechanism called the Aeroboom.

Byu Passive Inspection Cubesats (Pics), David Long, Passive Inspection Cubesat Usip Team

Utah Space Grant Consortium

The BYU Passive Inspection CubeSat (PICS) is the first stage of a series of technology demonstration missions for spacecraft capable of performing inspection, maintenance and assembly on another spacecraft. PICS will demonstrate ultrafast booting and power-up operation of system electronics and the low-risk inspection of the exterior of a spacecraft by a passive, inexpensive flyaway probe. Two flight systems deployed simultaneously will enable the collection of image data from each other as well as the parent spacecraft. Both units include spherical imaging capability using a camera on each face of the 10 cm cube so that attitude control is not …

Flexsar Bistatic And Monostatic Circular Sar Collection, Chad Knight, Mark Jensen, Trevor Jewkes, Jacob Gunther

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

Bistatic SAR data has advantages and disadvantages compared to monostatic data. This papers examines a combined bistatic and monostatic SAR data collection. The airborne platform used a monostatic radar system with two transmit and two receive channels in a pulsed spotlight mode. Another receive-only system was placed on an elevated mountaintop. The mountaintop receive system had two receive channels. The airborne asset flew in a full circle around several targets, exercising a large range of bistatic geometries. Various SAR modes were collected, including single-channel, quad-channel, and along-track interferometry (ATI) data for monostatic and bistatic modalities. This paper focuses on the …

Evaluation Of Flux Correction On Three-Dimensional Strand Grids With An Overset Cartesian Grid, Dalon G. Work

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Simulations of fluid flows over complex geometries are typically solved using a solution technique known as the overset meshing method. The geometry is meshed using grid types appropriate to the local geometry in a patchwork fashion, rather than meshing the entire geometry with one type of mesh. The strand-Cartesian approach is a simplification of this process. While high-order accurate solvers on Cartesian grids are simple to implement, strand grids are usually restricted to second-order accuracy, resulting in poor quality solutions. Flux correction is a high-order accurate solution method, specifically designed for use on strand grids. The flux correction method on …

A Survey And Performance Analysis Of Orbit Propagators For Leo, Geo, And Highly Elliptical Orbits, Simon P. Shuster

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

On-orbit targeting, guidance, and navigation relies on state vector propagation algorithms that must strike a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. To better understand this balance, the relative position accuracy and computational requirements of numerical and analytical propagation methods are analyzed for a variety of orbits. For numerical propagation, several differential equation formulations (Cowell, Encke-time, Encke-beta, and Equinoctial Elements) are compared over a range of integration step sizes for a given set of perturbations and numerical integration methods. This comparison is repeated for two numerical integrators: a Runge-Kutta 4th order and a NLZD4/4. For analytical propagation, SGP4, which relies on …

Mechanical Performance Of Natural / Natural Fiber Reinforced Hybrid Composite Materials Using Finite Element Method Based Micromechanics And Experiments, Muhammad Ziaur Rahman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

A micromechanical analysis of the representative volume element (RVE) of a unidirectional flax/jute fiber reinforced epoxy composite is performed using finite element analysis (FEA). To do so, first effective mechanical properties of flax fiber and jute fiber are evaluated numerically and then used in evaluating the effective properties of flax/jute/epoxy hybrid composite. Mechanics of Structure Genome (MSG), a new homogenization tool developed in Purdue University, is used to calculate the homogenized effective properties. Numerical results are compared with analytical solution based on rule of mixture, Halpin-Tsai as well as Tsai-Hahn equations. The effect of the volume fraction of the two …

Characterization Of The Thermal Resistance Of Grain Boundaries Of Cerium Oxide, Jesse Spackman

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Many materials are made up of small crystals, or grains. Grain boundaries are the interfaces between two grains and affect the flow of heat through the material. These interfaces serve to interfere with the energy carriers by scattering or disrupting them. Because of the negative effect these interfaces have on these energy carriers, they inhibit heat flow and act as thermal resistors. The thermal boundary resistance between two grains of the same material is sometimes referred to as the Kapitza resistance, although this term is also used to describe the thermal resistance between solid/solid interfaces of different materials or solid/liquid …

Water Entry Impact Dynamics Of Diving Birds, Saberul Islam Sharker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Plunge diving and surface diving are two main techniques used by seabirds for foraging purposes. While some plunge divers can dive into the water at very high speeds (24 m/s), surface divers do not. This study analyzes the free-surface impact of 3D printed bird head models with embedded accelerometers to determine why surface divers cannot dive safely at high speeds. The problem is investigated in the context of impact jerk where surface divers, unlike plunge divers, are found to experience non-dimensional jerk (J^∗) values exceeding a safe limit. This approach portrays itself as an unconventional yet effective method …

Application Of Strand-Cartesian Interfaced Solver On Flows Around Various Geometries, Yushi Yanagita

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This work examines the application of a high-order numerical method to strand-based grids to solve the Navier-Stokes equations. Coined "Flux Correction", this method eliminates error terms in the fluxes of traditional second-order finite volume Galerkin methods. Flux Correction is first examined for applications to the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations to compute turbulent flows on a strictly strand-based domain. Flow over three geometries are examined to demonstrate the method’s capabilities: a three-dimensional bump, an infinite wing, and a hemisphere-cylinder configuration. Comparison to results obtained from established codes show that the turbulent Flux Correction scheme accurately predicts flow properties such as pressure, velocity …

Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (Sunrise): Tracking Particle Acceleration And Transport In The Inner Heliosphere, Farah Alibay, Justin C. Kasper, T. Joseph W. Lazio

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

The authors present a space-based array designed to localize and track the radio emission associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Sun. Radio emission from CMEs is a direct tracer of the particle acceleration in the inner heliosphere and potential magnetic connections from the lower solar corona to the larger heliosphere. These questions are among those highlighted in the Solar Decadal Study, e.g., “Discover and characterize fundamental processes that occur both within the heliosphere and throughout the Universe.” Furthermore, CME radio emission is quite strong such that only a relatively small number of antennas is required, and a small …

Real-Time Optimal Trajectory Planning For Orbital Rendezvous, Satellite Inspection, And Docking Based On Convex Optimization, David K. Geller, Nicholas Ortolano, Aaron Avery

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

Convex optimization techniques have deterministic convergence properties, are self-starting, i.e., they do not require an initial guess, and have been tested in real-time environments. These optimization techniques are applied to the trajectory planning problem for orbital rendezvous and proximity operations. Spacecraft rendezvous, inspection, and final approach trajectories are considered. Optional trajectory constraints are considered including approach corridors, keep-out zones, and maximum thrust acceleration levels. Two linear dynamics models are investigated: Clohessy-Wiltshire dynamics to describe the relative motion in an LVLH frame, and a new relative orbital motion dynamics model to describe the motion relative to a spinning or uncontrolled spacecraft. …

Calibration & Testing, Space Dynamics Laboratory

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

WHY CALIBRATE?

Once you have designed and built a sensor, it is essential that you calibrate it—especially when it comes to space instruments. Calibration is the only way to translate your raw sensor data into scientific units that can be analyzed for vital information. Science can only occur when you have calibrated data.

In addition, calibration helps you verify that your sensor meets the requirements and helps to identify performance issues under operational conditions before you fly. Thorough calibration testing before deployment significantly increases the probability of mission success.

Iris: Deep Space Small Satellite Radio, Space Dynamics Laboratory

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

With nanosatellites being used for deep space missions, the need for a unique communications architecture to relay valuable mission data back to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is vital.

Ground Segment: Solutions, Space Dynamics Laboratory

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

SDL is a one-stop-shop for overhead and airborne ground systems and specializes in agile and flexible customized solutions. SDL’s solutions are Government owned with Government purpose rights. SDL has the facilities and staff to provide both unclassified and classified solutions.

Pearl: Spacecraft Platform, Space Dynamics Laboratory

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

SDL’s Pearl spacecraft platform delivers the performance, reliability, and mission flexibility needed for demanding small satellite missions. The Pearl platform architecture draws from common sets of components to build 3U, 6U, 12U, and custom sizes with variations in mission capability, parts quality, and radiation tolerance. This flexibility enables our professional staff to develop systems specific to each mission while drawing on a common design to maintain reliability and costs.

Nova Test Facility: Nanosat Operation Verification & Assessment Test Facility, Space Dynamics Laboratory

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

The Space Dynamics Laboratory’s (SDL) advanced NOVA test facility characterizes and verifies subsystem and system performance of small satellites up to 12 kg. The NOVA test facility provides testing to reduce preflight risk and verify requirements and is designed specifically for CubeSat-sized components and systems. NOVA augments SDL’s manufacturing, environmental testing, and calibration facilities, offering comprehensive testing capabilities and expertise for this class of small satellites.