Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

High Order Explicit Semi-Lagrangian Method For The Solution Of Lagrangian Transport And Stochastic Differential Equations, Hareshram Natarajan

CGU Theses & Dissertations

A semi-Lagrangian method is developed for the solution of Lagrangian transport equations and stochastic differential equations that is consistent with Discontinuous Spectral Element Method (DSEM) approximations of Eulerian conservation laws. The method extends the favorable properties of DSEM that include its high-order accuracy, its local and boundary fitted properties and its high performance on parallel platforms for the concurrent semi-Lagrangian and Eulerian solution of a class of time-dependent problems that can be described by coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian formulations. Such formulations include the probabilistic models used for the simulation of chemically reacting turbulent flows or particle-laden flows. Motivated by the high-fidelity simulation …

The Impact Of Human Assurance On Satellite Operations, Holly Handley, Dan Heimerdinger, Unal Tatar (Ed.), Adrian V. Gheorghe (Ed.), Omer F. Keskin (Ed.), Jean Muylaert (Ed.)

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Mission assurance is a method to guarantee mission success against a known set of risks; mission assurance is generally represented as a probability against a threshold of acceptable performance. Human assurance can be considered as the likelihood of acceptable operator performance given a set of conditions that include the operator, the system, and the environment. Standard mission assurance models tend to assume a qualified crew, but do not include other aspects of the internal or external environment that may impact the reliability of the human operator. A human assurance model can be created that allows the exploration of the variability …

Inertial Orbit Estimation Using Multiple Space Based Observers: A New Measurement Model, James Hippelheuser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Presented within this work is a new method for inertial orbit estimation of an object, either known or unknown, adaptable to a network of low-cost observation satellites. The observation satellites would only require a monocular camera for line of sight measurements. Using the line of sight measurements of each observer, a pair of orthogonal geometric planes that intersect both the observation satellite and the target are created. The intersection of the two planes in the inertial frame defines the new measurement model that is implemented with multiple observation nodes. Total system observability is analyzed and the instantaneous (per node) observability …

Piezospectroscopic Sensing Systems - Multi-Scale And In-Situ Sensing Technology For Structural Integrity, Remelisa Esteves

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The aerospace industry relies on nondestructive evaluation (NDE) to ensure aircraft safety and will benefit from methods that allow for early damage detection. Photoluminescence piezospectroscopy (PS) has demonstrated stress and damage sensing of substrates when coupled with alpha-alumina nanoparticles in a polymer matrix applied as a sensor coating. Alpha phase alumina exhibits photoluminescent spectral emission lines (R-lines) that shift due to changes in the stress state of the alumina. The coatings' capability for sensing early subsurface damage suggests the potential for implementing stress sensing paint for integrity monitoring of aircraft structures. To achieve a viable stress sensing coating that can …

Dynamic Modeling And Simulation Of A Power Plant Steam Condenser On The Siemens Sppa-T3000 Platform, Mohammad Odeh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

With rapidly increasing computational power, modeling and simulation of complex systems is gradually becoming the norm for evaluating and predicting performance. This research focuses on modeling and simulating thermodynamic behavior of condensers within Combined Cycle Power Plants. This is particularly useful for power generation companies as this allows a wide range of operating conditions to be simulated and characterized without risking damage or the need to shut down the power plant, all of which results in losing revenue in the process. Moreover, being able to observe the thermodynamic evolution of the system provides useful insight into efficiency and response to …

Diffraction Efficiency Measurement Instrument: Demi, Usu Department Of Mechanical And Aerospace Engineering

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

• We designed an automated system to do help QC technicians who currently check the efficiency of VPHGs by hand.

• Why should your reader be interested?

VPHGs are used in lab equipment and medical instruments and more. The largest VPHGs (like the ones the DEMI tests) are used in giant telescopes and other astronomical applications.

Biological Agent Dispersal And Containment, Austin Williams, Ryker Hacking, Weston Craig

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Purpose

• Model the flow of airborne anthrax surrogate particles through a training facility

• Design a training facility that will safely contain all the released particles

• Determine final location of the particles within the testing facility

• Determine most influential factors for particle containment

Importance

• Training for a bio-terrorist threat

• Researching airborne flow of particles is necessary to prepare for a potential threat

• Response plans depend on timely determination of the containment zone

Ganging Multiple Mechanical Sun Trackers, Katie Clark, Ben Hansen, Ben Hill, Cody Kelley, Chris Twede

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

The scope of this project was to design a mechanical solar tracker that implemented the algorithm/patent developed by Dr. Nicholas Flann. The solar tracker needed to be able to gang with other units using a single motor. The designed tracking unit is intended to:

• Rotate 350 degrees

• Use 3 seasonal tracks to follow the sun

• Be adjustable for wind and snow loads

• Be constructed from readily available materials

Autonomous Fixed Wing Drone, Glen Wright, Case Haws, Duke Madson, Chandler Oaks, Cory Christensen, Ryan Mears, Mike Wells

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Design an autonomous system for a fixed wing drone in order to fly a repeatable pattern for testing of RF communication equipment.

• Requirements:

– Fly a repeatable pattern

– 2 km range

– Transmit Telemetry points

– Switch between manual and autonomous

• Goals:

– Create a platform compatible with the second phase of the project

– Allow for autonomous takeoff and landing procedures

– Create a platform compatible with a host of airframes

Direct Pedal Actuation, Tyler Fallentine, Mitch Peterson, Bryce Fisher, Sam Hartvigsen, Alexander Bird

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Problem Description:

• The Team shall deliver a working prototype for direct pedal actuation of the brake and throttle for use in remote control of a vehicle.

• The delivered design shall:

• Measure 15 in. by 9 in. by 13 in.

• Fit in 90% of tested vehicles.

• Meet force, speed, back drive force, etc.

• Install in under 10 minutes.

Mini Rad-Dx Product Update, Tyler Child, Bradly Payne, Colton Smart, Morgan Ward

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Improve Current model by:

• Redesigning case to accommodate 3 – AA batteries

• Improve ingress protection to IP67

• Make device look more Rugged

• Eliminate one of the two LCD screens

• Design for injection molding production

• Develop a mobile app

Design, Build, Fly 2019-2020 Banner Towing Bush Plane, Brayden Barton, Carlton Collet, Talon Gamble, Daniel Gardner, Hayden Harmon, Daniel Scribner, Ryley Shingleton, Trevor Smith, Sabrina Snow

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

• Design: A bush plane capable of deploying and towing a banner in flight, carrying passengers, and taking off within 20 ft. Create simple systems capable of restraining the passengers and stowing, deploying, and releasing the banner.

• Build: The plane, passenger subsystem, and banner subsystem using durable and lightweight materials. Select a propulsion system with the necessary power and endurance to complete the missions.

• Fly: Three missions with the fastest lap times to achieve the highest score.

• Mission 1: Fly 3 laps within 5 minutes; take off in less than 20 ft.

• Mission …

Portable Leak Test System, Tyler Pulli, Joseph Arnell, Luke Osterhout, Dustyn Roberts

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Idaho National Laboratories requires an airtight seal on transportation casks to ship radioactive material. To ensure that the cask is air-tight, a system needs to be designed to measure whether air is leaking out of the seal and determines if the cask passes or fails.

Dynamics Within A Tunable Harmonic/Quartic Waveguide, Rudolph N. Kohn Jr., James A. Stickney

Space Dynamics Laboratory Publications

We present an analytical solution to the dynamics of a noninteracting cloud of thermal atoms in a cigar-shaped harmonic trap with a quartic perturbation along the axial direction. We calculate the first and second moments of position, which are sufficient to characterize the trap. The dynamics of the thermal cloud differ notably from those of a single particle, with an offset to the oscillation frequency that persists even as the oscillation amplitude approaches zero. We also present some numerical results that describe the effects of time-of-flight on the behavior of the cloud in order to better understand the results of …

Investigating The Numerical Stability Of Using An Impedance Boundary Condition To Model Broadband Noise Scattering With Acoustic Liners, Michelle E. Rodio, Fang Q. Hu, Douglas M. Nark

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

Reducing aircraft noise is a major objective in the field of computational aeroacoustics. When designing next generation quiet aircraft, it is important to be able to accurately and efficiently predict the acoustic scattering by an aircraft body from a given noise source. Acoustic liners are an effective tool for achieving aircraft noise reduction and are characterized by a frequency-dependent impedance value. Converted into the time-domain using Fourier transforms, an impedance boundary condition can be used to simulate the acoustic wave scattering by geometric bodies treated with acoustic liners. A Broadband Impedance Model will be discussed in which the liner impedance …

Study Of Non-Ideal Effects On Shock Wave Propagation, Cory Kinney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Shock tube experiments provide insightful data on combustion, emissions, and ablation characterization for a wide variety of defense and energy sector research topics. Accurate characterization of shock tube facilities is essential to verifying the accuracy of research data. Non-ideal effects, such as boundary layer growth, introduce uncertainty into pressure and temperature conditions, the primary independent variables of interest for shock tube research results. The effect of boundary layer growth on shock tube experiments was investigated by conducting simulations for University of Central Florida's two geometrically different shock tube using StanShock, a quasi-one-dimensional, reacting, compressible flow solver. The characteristic quantities considered …

Hybrid Physics-Informed Neural Networks For Dynamical Systems, Renato Giorgiani Do Nascimento

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Ordinary differential equations can describe many dynamic systems. When physics is well understood, the time-dependent responses are easily obtained numerically. The particular numerical method used for integration depends on the application. Unfortunately, when physics is not fully understood, the discrepancies between predictions and observed responses can be large and unacceptable. In this thesis, we show how to directly implement integration of ordinary differential equations through recurrent neural networks using Python. We leveraged modern machine learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow and Keras. Besides offering basic models capabilities (such as multilayer perceptrons and recurrent neural networks) and optimization methods, these frameworks offer …

A Study Into Validating A Coupled Method Of Characteristics And Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method Against Empirical Data, Andrew Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The following will outline the methodology and results of validating a coupled Method of Characteristics (MOC) and Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. This research focused specifically on modeling plume impingement, induced by Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters that flew on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) space shuttle Discovery. For each simulation, the continuum portion of the RCS thruster was simulated using MOC for solving hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) and computed with the NASA code, Reacting and Multi-phase Program (RAMP). The solution was then implemented as a starting condition into the NASA DSMC code, Direct Simulation and …

Active Fault-Tolerance Of The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Automatic Control Systems, Vuong Anh Trung, Nguyen Van Thinh, Nguyen Duc Thanh, Nguyen Quang Vinh, Tran Thuan Hoang

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

This paper presents an introductory overview of principles of the three-layer hierarchy of active fault-tolerance, providing, determination of the fault type with as many details as enough to get recoverable fault reason and failure toleration by flexible redundancy using; the conception of active fault-tolerant control in abnormal modes is described. Developed models and methods of a systematic approach to fault tolerance in the direction of the effective use of the signal, parametric and structural redundancies and selection of parrying tools. Performed experimental researches of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) automatic control systems (ACS).

Thermal-Hydraulic Optimization Of The Heat Exchange Between A Molten Salt Small Modular Reactor And A Super-Critical Carbon Dioxide Power Cycle, James Sherwood

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The next generation of nuclear power sources, Gen. IV, will include an emphasis on small, modular reactor (SMR) designs, which will allow for standardized, factory-based manufacturing and flexibility in the design of power plants by utilizing one or several modular reactor units in parallel. One of the reactor concepts being investigated is the Molten Salt Reactor concept (MSR), which utilizes a molten salt flow loop to cool the reactor and transfer heat to the power conversion cycle (PCS).Here, the use of a supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO2) Brayton cycle is assumed for that PCS. The purpose of this thesis is to …

A Numerical Simulation On The Airfoil S833 Equipped With Flapping Trailing Edge Fringes, H. Yu, Zifeng Yang

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

Design optimization has been increasingly investigated for an airfoil, aiming to reduce the vorticity in the wake and increase the aerodynamic performance. In the current work, a two-dimensional (2D) S833 airfoil equipped with a flapping fringe at the trailing edge has been studied using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The objective is to investigate the influence of the length (Lf) and flapping frequency (f) of the fringe on shedding vortices from the airfoil and the drag and lift coefficients. The validation of the current numerical approach for both static and dynamic motions of the airfoil was conducted. First, four different …

Thermoanalytical Studies On The Decomposition Of Energetic Ionic Liquids, Alan Esparza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Hydrazine has been extensively used as a propellant for space applications for more than half a century. However, its hazardous characteristics cause high storage and handling costs. For this reason, the search for alternatives, the so-called “green monopropellants,” is of great interest. Most green monopropellants are mixtures of an oxidizer and a fuel, and several ionic liquids (ILs) have been proposed for this application. Among them, hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN) and 2-hydroxylethylhydrazinium nitrate (HEHN) are promising oxidizer and fuel, respectively. The objective of the present work was to clarify the decomposition kinetics of both HAN and HEHN, using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), …

Design And Visual Servo Control Of A Mechanical Gripper For Autonomous Strawberry Harvesting, Jonah Mapes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

With rising labor costs and high consumer demand, economic conditions are becoming increasingly favorable for mechanization in the strawberry industry. However, virtually all strawberry crops are still picked by hand because the harvesting process is very challenging to automate, and strawberries are susceptible to bruising. For these reasons, the development of a harvester which can avoid damaging the fruit is of interest. Conventional designs for robotic grippers are less than ideal, as precise positioning or force feedback capabilities are required to reduce the risk of bruising. As an alternative, a novel "camera-in-hand" gripper design is presented which effectively avoids bruising …

Mechanical Properties Of Boron Carbide (B4c), Ruslan Kuliiev

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Boron carbide (B4C) is one of the most important opaque boride ceramics that has high hardness and Young's modulus that along with low density lead to a significant resistance to ballistic impact and, thus, B4C is broadly used as a protective material. B4C has also high neutron capturing cross section; therefore, it is used as control rods and neutron absorption shielding in nuclear reactors. In this work thermal, electrical and mechanical properties of dense B4C ceramics (99%) sintered using Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) were investigated. The Young's modulus of B4C measured by three different techniques – IE, RUS, and nanoindentation …

Impartial Sensor Tasking Via Forecasted Information Content Quantification, Matthew J. Gualdoni, Kyle J. Demars

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The consistently increasing population of space debris in orbit about the Earth is becoming an increasingly unavoidable problem, necessitating a proper handling of the problem of sensor tasking to effectively and efficiently obtain observations of space objects to maintain catalogs of their positions and velocities. A variety of approaches have been explored to achieve this in an autonomous fashion, assisting with space traffic management. This work presents new statistical analysis of the Kullback–Leibler divergence justifying the use of its expected value in generating sensor schedules. This divergence's use as an objective measure is extended to simultaneously consider, in an impartial …

Characterization Of Directed Energy Deposition Additively Manufactured Grcop-42 Alloy, Scott Landes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

GRCop is an alloy family constructed of copper, chromium, and niobium and was developed by NASA for high heat flux applications. The first of its kind, GRCop-84, was specifically designed for the environments seen by channel cooled main combustion chamber liners. To further increase thermal conductivity while maintaining material strength characteristics, the percentage of alloying elements were cut in half and GRCop- 42 was developed. In recent years, NASA has successfully additively manufactured GRCop with comparable material characteristics to wrought GRCop using a Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) process. Benefits of this process include fabrication of intricate cooling channels as …

Generation Of Premix Laminar Flame Speed Library, Sai Prashanth Kumar

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The Laminar flame speed is an essential parameter in measuring turbulent premixed combustion applied in Spark ignition engines. Instead of using power-law correlations, which is valid only for particular ranges, the procedure for generating a premixed laminar flame speed library is defined using MTU – Master mechanism for a wide range of charge mixture conditions inside an engine combustion chamber: Temperature (300 – 700 K), Pressure (1 – 70 bar) and reactant mixture composition of equivalence ratio (0.4 – 2.0) Laminar flame speed library is generated for methane. The mechanism's performance was improved by adjusting the pre-exponential factor of the …

A Cfd Study Investigating Drag Reduction For Different Offset And Inline Distance For Two Trucks Platooning, Wael Mokhtar, Kyle Dinger, Shardul Kachare, Mdrazib Hossain, Colin Britcher

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

The automotive industry invests huge resources to improve fuel consumption of commercial vehicles by improving their aerodynamic efficiency. Recently, numerous studies investigating the effect of platooning on aerodynamic drag of semi-trucks have been performed by researchers indicating a positive impact. For the present study, a three-dimensional computational study was performed to investigate the effect of varying offset and linear distance during platooning on the total drag of two semi-trucks. The study was conducted on a full-scale model using Reynold’s Averaged Navier-Strokes governing equations for a moving ground simulation using the STAR-CCM+ computational package. Furthermore, for turbulence, the standard k- …

Reliable Navigation For Suas In Complex Indoor Environments, Andrew J. Fabian

Theses and Dissertations

Indoor environments are a particular challenge for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Effective navigation through these GPS-denied environments require alternative localization systems, as well as methods of sensing and avoiding obstacles while remaining on-task. Additionally, the relatively small clearances and human presence characteristic of indoor spaces necessitates a higher level of precision and adaptability than is common in traditional UAV flight planning and execution. This research blends the optimization of individual technologies, such as state estimation and environmental sensing, with system integration and high-level operational planning.

The combination of AprilTag visual markers, multi-camera Visual Odometry, and IMU data can be used …

The Use Of Polyvinyldene Fluoride (Pvdf) Films For Pressure Measurement, Patrick Smith

Summer Community of Scholars Posters (RCEU and HCR Combined Programs)

No abstract provided.