University of Minnesota-Twin Cities Projects
Senior Design Project- UAV Tilt Rotor
For my senior design project five group members and myself were tasked with designing a UAV under 20 lbs to be able to take off/land vertically and fit into a small design case. For the project I am responsible for the propulsion aspects which include power requirements for different aspect of the flight, selecting the proper motor,battery and propeller for our design and the tilt rotor mechanism. The project is still in the design phase so this section should be updated soon! Here is a CAD drawing of our current design.
AFRL Sponsored Nanosat-6 Competion
The Nanosat project is a competition through the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in which many different universities compete in building and designing a satellite that carries out an experiment of the college’s choice. The winning school gets their satellite launched into space to carry out their experiment. I had many different responsibilities and jobs over the 18 months that I was involved with the project. I started as a team member in the Structures group where I was tasked with learning the modeling program Pro/Engineer to help with the design process and ANSYS Workbench for analyzing the structure during 20g-loading. I eventually moved on to being structures team lead with the responsibility of leading a team of six other students in the design and integration phases of the satellite. I also had the privilege of attending a satellite fabrication class at the AFRL lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico where I learned about different fabrication protocols and techniques. Due to the lack of student engineers in the communications team, I trained a replacement for the structures team lead so I could help the communications team. I helped in the testing and integration of the S-band radios and verified link budget calculations.
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This was a preliminary design of our TwinSAT that was made in Pro/Engineer. Our initial experiment was to collect GPS reflections off the secondary satellite for proximity detection. |
Micro Aerial Vehicle(MAV) Glider Flight Performance and Stability
For this sophomore level design project a group of five students and myself were tasked with designing an MAV glider, predict the performance and stability of the glider, and build and flight test it. For the project I was involved in the analyzing and simulating of the glider. We used an already developed simulink model of a MAV glider and imported our design into it to estimate performance. I then used the Aerospace Toolbox in MATLAB to simulate the trajectory of the glider for a picked initial velocity and euler rates.
For this sophomore level design project a group of five students and myself were tasked with designing an MAV glider, predict the performance and stability of the glider, and build and flight test it. For the project I was involved in the analyzing and simulating of the glider. We used an already developed simulink model of a MAV glider and imported our design into it to estimate performance. I then used the Aerospace Toolbox in MATLAB to simulate the trajectory of the glider for a picked initial velocity and euler rates.
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This is the video we made for a sophomore level mechanics of flight course. The project was to design micro UAV under 5 grams will good flight qualities. We used a SIMULINK model to simulate different designs to optimize the handling qualities.
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