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05/28/08 - AWARDS, motor testing, and upcoming rocket competition.
We have lots to report now that the semester has ended. Following the successful 2nd launch of RPR, we switched our focus onto the ESRA University rocket competition and the AIAA Region VI Student Conference hosted here in Tempe by our student chapter of AIAA: AIAA@ASU. All Daedalus members happen (by design) to be AIAA student members and officers. In fact, we make up the majority of the officer board! The conference was a HUGE success, both in terms of those participants that showed up to compete and also for Daedalus (and admittedly, for myself as well). Daedalus members Jacob Dennis, Steven Shark, and AJ Colangelo presented our work on our new two-stage rocket design, DARTS, as well as our motor progress. DARTS of course stands for something silly in true Daedalus fashion: Duck And Run To Safety. But before we get to the conference results, it would be best to list our semester progress in chronological order.
1) Motor Testing
Though I fully intend to put all this information up on the actual Projects page under the motor heading, it is certainly worth mentioning now. Over the past several semesters we have started an aggressive motor mixing program to get us ready for the rocket competition and to lead into a larger motor mixing program in the future. Almost one year ago, we reported buying a load cell and pressure transducer for use in motor testing. We finally got around to putting it all together and the results were fantastic. Jacob Dennis, our propulsion team lead and expert rocketeer, put together a nice coupler for the pressure transducer to fit into an H-motor forward bulkhead.
Not to be outdone, Thomas Villarreal, our structures team lead and the TA for the Controls and Measurements and Data Analysis course, wrote a fancy little VI program that linked both the pressure transducer and the load cell to a laptop capable of storing the measurements. Of course, with the load cell in the way, we needed to build an enclosure to vector the thrust safely to the load cell without harming the pressure transducer. Using our old op-amp that we built, we were able to amplify the signals enough to be read accurately once we calibrated the system. Though this all sounds like a trivial task when you're in a lab setting, getting it to work in the remote desert can be tough. Fortunately for us, the testing site for these small H-motors was not all too remote. Instead we opted to test at a paintball field currently under construction: Diversion Paintball. And yes, Diversion Paintball (opening soon!) is owned by both Thomas Villarreal and myself. Though we did a series of motor testing with different propellant formulations, the last two were especially promising.
Using the pressure and thrust histogram curves for the two motors (operating at different stagnation pressures), were were able to extract our "a" and "n" values. These values feed into the all too familiar solid rocket motor regression rate equation as a function of pressure. Knowing these values, we can design a larger motor and have a good idea of how it will operate and what kind of thrust profile we can expect. Feeding this into our rocket trajectory program for each stage's motor will give us a reasonable estimate of the final altitude of our rocket.
2) Exhibition Events and ASU Student Organization Awards
Daedalus participated in several exhibition and recruiting events this past semester at ASU. Both were geared towards letting the general ASU public know who we are and what we do. One such event was presenting our work at a luncheon honoring a $4million grant to the Fulton School of Engineering for K-12 STEM outreach. I thought our display was particularly impressive, though in retrospect I wish we brought along another rocket or two.
You'll notice the two poster boards on either side of the rocket. These are some new posters we had drafted by Mary F. Villarreal who is a long-time Daedalus supporter and a talented little photoshop artist. Both posters are quite informative:
We also presented at the 1st Annual Engineering Student Organization Exhibition, and I hope to receive some pictures from that event soon. Immediately following the exhibition was an awards ceremony attended by Deans, Faculty, staff, and students. Quite a number of awards were given out, and Daedalus took home the "Outstanding K-12 Programs" plaque for our outreach efforts.
3) AIAA Student Conference
Likely our biggest event of the semester was our participation in the 2008 Region VI AIAA Student Conference. This was a major event for us, both in terms of our presented Daedalus work, but also all the work that we put in necessary to keep the conference running smoothly. Fortunately for the conference we had a lot of help, especially from the Phoenix AIAA officers. Of them, Mark Longanbach and Rob Sears were extremely helpful. Mark is actually a past Daedalus member and took over as chair of Phoenix AIAA once he graduated from ASU. It's nice to see our illustrious Daedalus alumni giving back...
I have to admit, the competition at the conference was very stiff. There were some excellent presentations made in all three categories: Graduate, Undergraduate, and Team. The agenda was packed with rocket related presentations and were were blessed to speak with rocket team members from UCLA, CSU-LB, and UW. Of them, we know that UCLA will be at the upcoming rocket competition and we hope to get in a collaborative effort with UW to help launch their aerospike engines.
The results of the competition were reported on the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering website, and are listed here for convenience:
The ASU student chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) recently hosted the 2008 AIAA Region VI Student Conference April 17 – 19 at the Tempe Mission Palms. During the conference, the AIAA National Organization sponsored three separate technical competitions: an Undergraduate individual competition, a Graduate individual competition, and a Design Team competition. Participants completed an abstract, paper, and presented their work to AIAA and industry professionals. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places winners were awarded cash prizes, and an all expense paid trip was awarded to 1st place winners for them to present at the AIAA National Student Conference.
MAE is proud to congratulate three of their graduate students for their awards: James Villarreal (1st place), Chinmoy Nath (2nd place) and Javier Avalos (3rd place).
James Villarreal is an Aerospace Engineering graduate student working with Prof. Pavlos Mikellides. He received the best paper award in the Graduate category for his paper titled: “Numerical Modeling of a High Efficiency Low Energy Pulsed Inductive Thruster for Space Applications.” James received his BSE degree in Aerospace Engineering at ASU in May 2006 and he plans to graduate with his MS degree this summer. He intends to continue his graduate work as a PhD student in the fall researching launch vehicle technologies. James says his long term goals are to own his own company, focusing in orbital launch vehicle technologies, and says: “like most other aerospace engineers I would also like to become an astronaut, but unlike them I am just silly enough to build my own rocket to get the job done.”
James will compete against the Graduate winners from each of the seven regions at the International Student Conference, which will be held in conjunction with the 47th Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibition in Orlando on January 5, 2009. At the conference, James will be joined by the Daedalus Astronautics team, the student rocket group on campus, which placed 1st in the Design Team competition for their paper “Development of a Staging Sounding Rocket and Experimental Solid Rocket Motors.” James is the Project Director of Daedalus Astronautics; team presenters Jacob Dennis, Steven Shark, and AJ Colangelo were responsible for the winning presentation.
Chinmoy Nath placed 2nd in the Graduate competition for his paper “Ship Wakes in a Temperature Stratified Fluid”. Chinmoy is currently working on his Master’s degree in MAE under the direction of Dr. H.J.S. Fernando in the Center for Environmental Fluid Dynamics. Chinmoy is completing his second semester at ASU; he is also very interested in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and hopes he can implement CFD in the Environmental Fluid Dynamics field and extend his career in the same direction. Javier Avalos placed 3rd in the Graduate competition for his paper “On Damping Entire Bladed Disk through Dampers on Only a Few Blades.” Javier is pursuing his doctoral degree working with Dr. Marc Mignolet.
Honestly I couldn't be more pleased with our Daedalus progress. Without so much of a whisper from myself and other graduate Daedalus members, our undergraduate members (led by Jacob Dennis) were able to put together an award winning paper and presentation. Though I would like to post the PowerPoint presentation on this website, it is a little too involved with embedded videos. Of course, if you happen to be in Orlando, Florida next January , then you can watch both my graduate presentation and Daedalus' team presentation at the AIAA Foundation International Student Conference held in conjunction with the 47th Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibition.
4) Upcoming Events
It's time for this update to come to a close, but there will be another update up soon since we have a lot coming up. This includes a total of THREE rocket outreach events this summer (middle, high school, and entering freshman), the first of which will start in early June. Of course our rocket competition is also coming up in late June, so that will be quite an update as well. With that said, I leave you with a little taste of our DARTS rocket, soon to be debuted in full in less than a month:
~ James Kendall Villarreal; Project Director