IMAGES HAVE BEEN CLEARED FOR PUBLIC VIEWING!

BF-1 landed at Pax River yesterday.

So purty!

- Post your current wallpaper
- Explain in no more than five sentences why you're using that wallpaper!
- Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!

Are you a bad enough president to rescue the dudes ladies?


Why yes that is pyongyang in the background.

Dude,
Dude,
Dude

I just realized that work is like high school, if high school were awesome. I'm there for eight hours, I eat cafeteria lunch, and I pass in papers. Except my papers involve zero dimensional iterative solvers and thermodynamics, the boss is nerdier than me, and I have a much better chair. The lack of pimples and vicious social conflicts further improves it. Also I am getting paid for this.

Also, I play with jets. A shiny new jet to be exact. Somewhat a surprise since my interning experience mostly involved a variant of the PW2000, which is OLD, and JT8D's which CAME OUT THE SAME YEAR AS THE FIRST US BEATLES ALBUM. Old stuff.

Gyah, I have so much to learn!

Scanner is too much trouble to use, but here's some digital arts.
( [Nine Drawings] )

Tadaa! The thesis is now available!

Biologically Inspired Wing Planform Optimization

I really wish my senior project was also available, since it had much more glorious maths, but not much can be done about NDA's.

Today I'm headed back east. Work starts soon and I'm nervous and excited all at once. I'll miss being here with Ben though.

Also: Joy of joys there's a nearby Whole Foods! I have a weakness for overpriced hippy foods :]

Apologies for going AWOL for a bit. Eventually I'll come back and post arts but right now I'm taking a well deserved vacation from everything.

Long story in condensed form:

• The thesis was approved with the addition of a few things, mostly error bars and more explanations. These have been included, I got an A, and it is now uploaded to WPI. It's not yet visible, I'll post a link when it is available.
• I paid for the car and am very excited. Six cylinders! Surprisingly good mileage! Drives like a boat! New tires!
• Not long after I flew out to Seattle to see Ben. The weather has been beautiful. We've been hanging out and having fun, and I've been buying a lot of art prints and hippy dippy soaps, also giant gaudy sunglasses.
• I really like these soaps.
• Saw Star Trek in IMAX. It was glorious.
• Saw Terminator, wondered what Chekov was doing in it.
• Went to San Juan Island, very pretty. Climbed a little hill. Ate too much good food and got sick.
• Had the best chai ever.
• Going to the mac store to get Fluffernutter fixed. Poor baby has a cracked case.

I think I'll be going to a friend's of the nib meeting this Wednesday, I missed the last one. Yay!

Yes, I can has 4.0. :D

THESIS APPROVED

Now I just gotta present o_O

I think I finished my thesis. Aside from the defense this Friday, I'm done. 176 pages of genetic algorithms and low reynolds, low aspect ratio wing flow. Turns out there are some weird separation bubbles at those conditions. I think I did a pretty good job, and I'm not too worried about the defense since I'm a master at answering weird questions quickly.

I saw star trek last night in celebration. It was very good, a perfect amount of camp. Then I started removing stuff from my apartment. My brain is not doing anything for a while.

I did a lot of thesis stuff yesterday, and most importantly, a lot of pretty stuff that I can show to people (I intend to impress my professor in particular) . Woe is the student with a nice thesis and no pretty pictures to advertise it.

I've uploaded the videos to youtube, the first one is flow visualization with kaolin and kerosene, the second is a tuft study of the same wing. Much more scientific information is provided in the description on the actual pages, but I've embedded them for your convenience :)


Test drove a potential car today, V6 awwwwwww yeahhhhhh

I'm waiting to borrow a multimeter from a currently busy professor, so it's another episode of me sitting in a lab and being bored. This time the noises are people working on robots a few rooms down.

I'm actually doing a lot better, since I never planned on walking for my graduation, it turns out that I have a massive extension to my thesis. So a huge load has been taken off my back. I intend to finish it by the middle of May now and it is currently 98 pages long. Mostly I have to add in some data after I get the multimeter, and edit the whole thing.

I have an apartment in Connecticut, I've been approved and everything. I might be buying a car this weekend, a used monster. It's an old person's car, but all reports suggest it's built like a brick shithouse and gets great highway mileage. It's not much larger than a new Camry either. It's cheap too.

So yes, I'm actually excited now and feeling better. School is great when I'm not being worked into the ground. I love WPI but the ME department treats it's TAs like disposable machines. I still feel lied to since they all declared that work would never be more than 20 hours a week. Turns out 30 hours was average for some classes. Not easy considering I was doing 30 hours a week of schoolwork in addition to that.

But it's ending, and then it's only 40 hours a week at a real job.

( Enough jibba-jabba! Time for art! [12] )

I love it when my predictions turn out correct!

( Deep down inside, I want to be Tom Clancy... )

I have less than five weeks left. I will be slowly going insane and I apologize for any radio silence.

Happy Pi day everyone!

Go out, eat some pie and marvel at the ratio of it's circumference to twice the pie's radius! You can also have debates on whether our own universe is perfectly euclidian!

Is a bit of my impression of the CNC machine. Yesterday I finally managed to get to cut out my little wings. They have annoyingly complex curves so a band saw wouldn't cut it (literally). It was surprisingly easy, I made models of the wings in Solidworks, gave them to the lab tech and he quickly converted them into whatever code the machine uses. The only work was in cutting out the aluminum and attaching it to the sacrificial plywood, which itself had to be clamped down. It was fun playing with the drill press and bandsaw anyways (after the lab tech made sure I did nothing stupid).
( {Robots and Aluminum Wings} )

No time for scanning, so here's some digital art. Some are reposts from DA.
( {Six Digital Drawings} )
AUGH TWO MONTHS THEN I'M FREE.

This is very long winded, so under a cut it goes.

( [Five Word Meme From Astrae] )

Ask if you want me to give you five words to write about :)

Here's a rough draft for my abstract I'll have to send in to secure my spot in the graduate research fair. I'm getting pretty nervous now. There's going to be people looking at me and asking questions and they're all going to be be ridiculously smart doctors who've worked for JPL and NASA and it's going to take all my nerves not to shake like a leaf D:

Thankfully it's in April. Phew.

Though expanding, current understanding of the aerodynamics of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) still leaves much to be desired. These low aspect ratio wings exist in turbulent and laminar flow, making analysis difficult. With that in mind, this project is intended to explore and refine various techniques in the study of MAV wings. Genetic Algorithms were used to investigate optimized wing patterns at high and low angles of attack with varying amounts of success. While the low angle of attack wings were easily optimized into a shape far different and potentially more efficient than the oft-used Zimmerman planform, the higher angle of attack tests proved to have more noise than could be compensated for. Interestingly the optimized low angle of attack wings appeared similar to the wing planform of order Galliformes birds, which also have low aspect ratio wings. Flow visualization techniques were also studied, including tuft studies and china clay (kaolin) pigmentation. The tuft studies, though illuminating proved to significantly alter the lift and drag of the wings, casting doubts onto the accuracy of their measurements. China clay mixed with kerosene may offer a less invasive measurement system and is currently under investigation. The china clay will be used to investigate the air flow over several wing examples, including the Zimmerman planform, the ring necked pheasant, and one of the best performing high angle of attack wings.

I haven't had time to scan in art, I'll try too soon but make no promises. There's been a bunch of recent conferences on turbofan technology so I've spent my free time at those

Sitting in the aero lab being bored is a rather common occurrence for me, and once again I'm presented with an odd noise. Thankfully it isn't the clanging of the vacuum chamber, but the soft putt-putt of a pump. The pump connects the MEM's lab next door, where they keep the room at a constant pressure of about 20psia gage (positively pressurized). This constant pumping of highly filtered air into the room keeps any dust from getting in, necessary for working on MEM's. I imagine it's the exact opposite whereheatherbeast works, negative pressurization is often used to keep infectious diseases inside of a room.

  MEM's are Micro-Electro-Mechanical devices. Larger than nanotechnology, and about .001mm in size, they're found in many electronics. Admittedly I don't know as much about them as I do aerospace technology, though I'm fairly certain most of the work done here is with lab-on-a-chip type investigations. Basically, doing experiments so tiny, the equipment required would blow away if you sneezed.

  The room has an airlock, and everybody in it is covered head to toe in white suits designed to keep all your hair, clothes fibers, and skin cells to yourself. They look very silly.

Aside from the MEM’s group, Nick’s vacuum work, and me there's three other experiments set up (that I know of). One is a power-scavenging program for Pratt & Whitney. Testing a jet engine requires drilling lots of holes into it to install the various sensors. Since the last thing gas-turbine engines like is disturbed flow, the less holes and devices the better. Otherwise you start getting into a situation resembling quantum mech., where the act of observation is actually changing the process! Their goal is to use the ambient heat (which there's a lot of) to power the sensors, eliminating power cables and batteries.

The next experiment is trying to make cheap kite based power generators. Instead of using a turbine, a kite-based generator would be able to reach into the stronger winds at higher altitudes. Of course, you have to deal with properly changing the angle of attack on the kite, keeping it up there, and warning planes away.

Finally, there's an experiment funded by the army into making steerable round parachutes. Parafoils are highly maneuverable, but expensive and hard to make. Having a cheaper, but still steerable round parachute is apparently something they want.

And... my tests for the day are done. Maybe I’ll do more tomorrow, I’m not sure. Thankfully there’s only two more left.

Sweet tapdancing Christ, magnetic monopoles exist.

I'm floored, this is one of the things that physics professors wax poetic on, something that should have existed but never was found.

I'm trying to wrap my head around how a charge would move in the field of a monopole.

YOU GUYS WE ARE LIVING IN THE FUTURE

It appears someone has borrowed one of the sensitive scales from the lab. There's one left, but I need two to take any real measurements, so I'm in the rather unenviable position of waiting around in a noisy lab until someone who might know where it is shows up. The noise is a product of the vacuum chamber behind me, it's currently pumping down to 1/1000th atm. Once it's done with that, part of the chamber will be cooled to 20 Kelvin or so. The remaining air will hit it and freeze to the surface, further lowering the pressure. I remember doing calculations of the flux on the freezing surface. I considered doing a thesis on electric propulsion (ion thrusters and whatnot) with the vacuum chamber, but seeing how much work Nick had to do to even get it to work makes me glad I went with the more reliable wind tunnel.

What I was hoping to do today was to confirm the relative lift/drag ratios of a few wings. I completed the high angle of attack genetic algorithm a while ago, but at the higher angle there was much more noise, to the point where the algorithm could barely work. If my optimized wing from the genetic algorithm performs better than the industry standard (the Zimmerman planform) and a dummy wing, then it will be evidence that the algorithm worked, if only a little. I'm not too worried. I've still got the results from the low angle tests, so it's not like my whole project depends on this.

Once I clear my high angle wing, I'll be cutting flat plates out of aluminum. Thery'll be shaped like my optimized wings, the Zimmerman wing, and a galliform bird wing (I'm thinking it will be a ring necked pheasant). They won't be exactly the same as the originals, both my optimized wings and birds have feathers. But they will have the same planform, and thus the same chord lengths. After testing their lift and drag for comparison, they'll be painted with a mix of turpentine and kaolin and subjected to the same airflow as in the tests. The turpentine will dry in the wind and deposit the white kaolin in lines marking the flow of air (small instabilites form lines parallel to the aiflow in the turpentine). Hopefully it will also show a clear demarcation where the flow goes from laminar to turbulent. I'm wondering if the optimized wing planforms are manipulating when the flow turns to get better lift/drag values.

Once all the wings are painted, tested, and photographed, I'll be done with testing. Then it will just be lots of analysis, math, and some more research. This will eventually be submitted to the AIAA journal, so I'm excited.

That's a very simplified version of what I'm doing for my thesis right now. I'm mostly writing it for my own sanity (trying to put a lot of little things into one large picture), but I'll gladly answer any questions.

If anyone wants to see an example of what I'll be doing, here's a link to a similar test at UW. You can actually see where the vortices created by the strakes are!