Gliding Into the AAE Major

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Being the newest faculty member in The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State, Dr. Carl Hartsfield anticipated the "opportunity" to teach one of the courses that introduces sophomores to the aerospace engineering major. Perhaps what he didn't anticipate, was that the subject of a few of the initial labs (gliders and gliding) would make a nice metaphor for how smoothly he has transitioned from his role as assistant professor and deputy department head of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Air Force Institute of Technology, located within the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, to that of assistant clinical professor within the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State. The stated objective of his Intro to Aerospace Engineering II course is to ensure that sophomores understand static stability in aircraft; the fundamentals of air breathing propulsion; rocket propulsion and spacecraft orbits as well as basic space environment issues and space launch. His unstated, but implicit objective is to ensure that all the calculations and statistics examined in class stir the imagination and intellect of the student engineer.

"Aerospace is filled with people who are excited about airplanes and spacecraft. Aerospace engineers will stop conversations to watch a plane fly over," he admitted. "I want students to be that excited about what's buzzing overhead. The material they need to learn is complex and what makes them successful is fascination with flight."

Hartsfield's spring semester course follows Assistant Professor Jim Gregory's Intro to Aerospace Engineering I course. Like Gregory's fall course, it utilizes a variety of labs to introduce students to fundamental aerospace engineering concepts. Stability and control experiments include: designing, building and flying a glider with movable control surfaces that can be adjusted to fly in a straight line, or perform controlled turns within a classroom, and using a flight simulator to obtain stability and control information about a light aircraft. Building and flying a small glider inside a classroom is actually a challenging task that enforces some very real restrictions on the designs. The flight simulator lab allows students to get some feel for the impact of the calculations they perform in class and in homework. Their simulator lab provides the virtual experience for aircraft take off, cruise, maneuvers, and landing.  Simulator data is then used to assess the stability and controllability of the airplane. Propulsion experiments include: measuring performance for radio control aircraft propellers in a wind tunnel to capture effective thrust and propeller efficiency data at different airspeeds. For space launch, the class designs and builds small rockets, analyzes their performance, and verifies the predicted performance in a flight test. For orbital mechanics, students use industry standard software to observe the simulated behavior of current NASA, USAF, and commercial satellites, and simulate the on-orbit performance of a new satellite to measure the effectiveness of a new orbit in accomplishing parts of a mission.

Though Hartsfield acknowledges that the initial classroom topics (stability and controls, longitudinal static stability and yaw/roll stability) are essential building blocks for aerospace study, it's the second half of the course that he is clearly thrilled to teach. His research interests include chemical rocket and electric space propulsion, reacting free shear flows, and aircraft survivability enhancement. He concluded, "Rocket engines represent one of the most challenging problems in engineering. The temperatures, pressures, propellant flow rates, and nearly every other characteristic are all at levels unheard of in most other branches of engineering, and must be, in order to launch the largest vehicles to ever leave the surface of the Earth. The space environment is one of the harshest environments we design vehicles to operate in, but when we put a spacecraft in orbit, we expect it to last for years, or even decades, without anyone ever touching it again." To that point, students will also be exposed to the multi-disciplinary nature of aerospace, tying in the electromagnetism and modern physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics – all studies related to the process of launching space systems, and keeping them in a controlled orbit for the years of life they need to operate.

Category: Undergraduate