T-Tail

Admin Project Achievements

We’ve been working through the weekend to assemble our platform to a flight-ready condition. The first item of completion is the T-Tail. We started by positioning the internal structural components and cementing them into place along several carbon-fiber rods. This was followed by installation of the elevator/rudder servos and the routing of internal wires. Finally, we finished the tail with …

Chilly?

Admin Project Learning

The SWEC (Sub-wet bulb evaporative chiller) is a unit that is used in our home to cool water through evaporative cooling. Water is cooled through evaporation when a phase change occurs and the water at the surface absorbs enough energy from its surroundings to become a gas instead of a liquid. That energy absorbed comes from the air and water …

Feel the Breeze?

Admin Project Learning

Casa Del Sol is created to adapt to the Southern California weather, drawing its innovation from the California state flower, the golden poppy. Just like a live flower, Casa Del Sol can automatically open its windows as if it were alive. Window actuators assist in passive cooling where it can open when the temperature sensors have detected uncomfortable temperature levels …

The Mad Queen

Admin Project Learning

Greetings mortals! You have stumbled upon the highly classified blog of the Wing Design Team Lead a.k.a. The Mad Queen. Reading further is clearly not for the faint hearted. You might accidentally stumble upon the answer to life itself in the depths of my thoughts. Be warned! At the start of this project, I had no idea how to design …

Battery Boxes

Admin Uncategorized

This week has been a week of manufacture. We continued fabricating our battery boxes which have been produced from 0.09” 6061 T6 sheet Aluminum and look, up to now, exactly how we designed them. We now need to weld the sections together and electrically insulate them to complete them. This task required more man hours than we estimated which we …

Solar Thermal Collectors

Admin Project Learning

Solar thermal collectors collect free energy through individual pipe-shaped collectors that absorb heat from sunlight. The absorbed energy is transferred into heat in a transfer fluid, for our case water, which then flows through pipes and finally transfers the energy to usable water stored in a storage tank. The heated water can then be used for any hot water requirements …

Venturi Design and Manufacturing

Admin Uncategorized

In the last two weeks, we have managed to have the engine running well consistently. Some minor fixes included correction of the engine timing. Thanks to the hard work and expertise of our head engineer Rich Hack and collaborator Max Venaas at the Advanced Power and Energy Program, the Generac system has been successfully connected to our existing load bank …

Redesigning Ground Station Software

Admin Uncategorized

The software team has been working on redesigning the ground station application and adding functionality as needed to take the application from a prototype to a polished product stage. The students are working on the design of the buttons and the layout of the application adding some functionality that allows the user to customize the ground station layout according to …

Improvement after Brainstorming

Admin Project Learning

For week four we began data collecting and shortly ran into problems with our electrolyzer system. At first the electrolyzer was not producing proportional amounts of hydrogen and oxygen that we theoretically predicted. We observed that the outlet nearest to the solution inlet produced the most amount of gas, regardless of how we connected the voltage polarities. So we again …

Success in Completing a Complete Circuit

Admin Project Learning

There have been many trials along the way for myself and my ragtag group of chemical engineers to get to where we are today. What we learned very quickly when we started out was that bureaucracy and shipping have to be taking into account when planning the group’s research schedule. There have been multiple instances when the project was delayed …