College of Engineering

Aeronautics & Astronautics

 

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Student Projects

Many of our Graduate and Undergraduate students participate in research facilites here at A&A. Visit the individual labs for detailed information.

 

2007

• UW AIAA student chapter has received the 2005-2006 Outstanding Student Branch award for the Western Region (VI) of AIAA.
• A team of six students from the AA421 class attended the NASA/USRA-sponsored Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Conference (RASC-AL) in Galveston to present a paper on their design project: "Luna POLARIS, A Lunar Positioning and Communications System". They did an outstanding job, and I'm pleased to report that the team was voted Forum Favorite by their peer Universities. Team members were Angela Stickle, Greg Quetin, Ryan Trescott, Lesley Newberry, David Peters, and Mike Music.
• The Tenth Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium particpants:
  
  

  Francesco Deleo	Senior	Crash Worthiness and Energy Absorption with Composite Materials
  Joseph Duncan	Senior	Evaluating the Performance of an Ion Thruster
  Davud Kasparov	Recent Graduate	Flow Imaging Techniques and Heated Vortex Ring Generator
  David Peters	Senior	A Data Reduction Algorithm for Evaluating the Thrust Produced By the High Power Helicon Engine
  Nathan Powel	Junior	Linkages between remote and sub-surface measurements of internal waves
  Gregory Quetin	Senior	Mini-High Powered Helicon
  Andree Susanto	Senior	Bimodality as an Outlier Detection Criterion for Post Cross-Correlation PIV Data
  Andree Susanto	Senior	Mode-Ratio Bootstrapping Method for PIV Outlier Correction
  Michelle Sybouts	Freshman	Fuel for the Future: Increasing the Quiescent Period of Plasma by Increasing Gas volume in the ZaP Experiment

  
  
  

 

2006 Students fly in ZeroG Experiment

In August of 2005 the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) announced that they will be allowing microgravity flights with the Zero Gravity Corporation (ZeroG) during the national SEDS conference in November, 2005. Unfortunately, as the conference grew closer, not enough schools had raised the money and the flight date was pushed to April 2006. Then, around the end of February, it was announced that funding did not come through. The national SEDS board had relied on an $80,000 donation from a leading aerospace company, but did not get it. At this point, the SEDS-UW branch (created and organized by two A&A students Anna Askren and Jamie Hale) took matters into their own hands and began negotiating directly with ZeroG. The flight date was reset to August 6th 2006 and the ticket cost was set to $3,000 per flyer and $1,000 per experiment. By reducing the scope, we were able to raise over $20,000. With the support from sponsors and the fundraising by A&A students, the team consisted of 3 university students, 2 high school students and their teacher, and both projects.

The entire project was split into two sections, a research section and an outreach section. The research section was an experiment to study varying accelerations on generalized Rayleigh-Taylor flow and was going to be my Masters thesis before all the delays. The outreach section was a high school competition to promote math and science to economically disadvantaged schools. Five schools participated in the competition by submitting proposals for their own microgravity project and the winners were selected by our team and faculty advisors. The winning high school was Pasco High School.

The team arrived in Florida and went on an incredible tour of KSC but, unfortunately, the experiments were destroyed by UPS. The university apparatus comprised two shipments, and only one made it. That package, along with the high school experiment, was severely damaged during shipping by UPS. Nonetheless, the team had a quick brainstorming session and came up with a game plan to make some worth of our work. We and the high school students pulled an all-nighter the night before the flight and would have been ready for flight. Unfortunately, the weight distribution on the plane had already been calculated by the ZeroG crew and there was no time to get all the necessary signatures before flight. Nonetheless, the students and teacher all got to fly and had an excellent time. Despite the delays and setbacks, the project was a success because of the lessons learned and difference made.

Andrews Space was our first major donor and along with the UW A&A Dept, gave the most of all our sponsors: AIAA, Vista Engineering Technologies, Space Generation Advisory Council, FSRI, National Space Society, Kirsten Wind Tunnel, GenCorp, AeroJet, Research Institute for Space Exploration, and Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium.

 

	University flyers:  - Jeffrey C. Boulware, team lead  - Michael Frostad  - Anna Askren High School flyers:  - David Hege, teacher  - Stephanie Garcia  - Ariel Hale University ground crew:  - Katie Volz  - Jaime Hale Click on Below Images for Full Size

 

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