AE Student Groups Place in EOH

Congratulations to Aerospace Engineering student organizations for your showing in Engineering Open House 2014! Almost 20 groups put together exhibits. Earning trophies were:

Coolant System in Microgravity, Second Place, Presentation of Society: The Illinois Space Society invited visitors to learn about the effects different temperatures and pressures have on the fluid flow in a coolant system, and why a prototype designed for use in microgravity is necessary. The prototype an ISS team will construct will be flow aboard NASA's "Vomit Comet" microgravity plane later this spring.

Student Aircraft Builders help visitors build toy airplanes.

The Rheology Zoo: Fluids, Solids, and Thing-In-Between, Third Place, Best Kickoff of EOH: Another ISS exhibit defied the classical definitions of fluids and solids with rheologically complex materials, also known as non-Newtonian fluids. Visitors were encouraged to experience the peculiar physics of these substances in demonstrations and hands-on demos of key rheological phenomena: fluid-to-solid transitions such as shear-thickening and viscoelasticitly, the rod-climbing effect, and self-siphoning. Everyday materials such as playdoh, silly putty, cake batter, and chewing gum were used as demonstrators told how Illinis is impacting bioinspired engineering, modern cuisine, product design, soft robotics, and fire suppression.

An AE student serves up frozen marshmallows.

Positioning Underwater Robots, Second Place, Original Undergrad Research: The project demonstrated positioning underwater robots where Global Positioning Systems cannot reach. The idea was to build an underwater robot system with both under water nodes and surfacing nodes. The surfacing nodes would receive GPS signals and relay GPS information to underwater robots. The robots would be linked via scoustic signals, providing relative distance measurements. Positioning of the robots would be calculated by integrating the absolute GPS information from the surfacing nodes and relative distances from the underwater mobile nodes.

View scenes from EOH on Aerospace Engineering's Facebook Page!