3/29/2022 Debra Levey Larson
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Two aerospace engineering graduate students’ art was selected as semifinalists in the annual Image of Research multidisciplinary competition celebrating the diversity and breadth of student research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Voting is open until April 12 to determine the winner in the People’s Choice winner. Each voter can select three images.
Or Dantsker’s entry entitled, “The Future of Agriculture, Powered by the Sun”
About his image, Dantsker said, “High above the fields of the Midwest, the UIUC-TUM Solar Flyer soars, providing the capability for all-day agricultural surveys. The optimized 13-foot wingspan aircraft is powered by state-of-the-art solar arrays and high-density batteries to enable visually intensive tasks such as crop pathogen detection. Over the past two years, the aircraft performed multiple 8+ hour flights covering 400 to 500 acres per hour in survey-like flight paths with power to spare for onboard computation. Not only were these flights performed under environmentally challenging, cloudy and windy conditions, but they were also done under waning solar availability in late August and early September. Therefore, the implication is twofold: the aircraft has the capability to collect crop data under real-world flight conditions—conditions impossible for multi-rotor drones, and do so for the majority of the growing season from March to September.”
Ben Ringel’s submission is called “Plasma Proof.”
Ringel provided this description of his research image: “Return from space is a challenging and dangerous endeavor. At velocities five to ten times greater than a speeding bullet, a space capsule entering a planetary atmosphere must decrease its kinetic energy to near zero before impacting the ground. Where does much of this energy go? The answer: thermal energy. Because of this, space vehicles require robust high-temperature hypersonic materials to protect them from hot plasmatic flow that envelopes
the vehicle during entry. This image depicts the testing of a basic high-temperature hypersonic material: solid graphite. A hemispherical sample of graphite was subjected to a high enthalpy plasma air flow under vacuum at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium. This material, which is normally black in color, is heated to temperatures as high as 1,600 degrees Centigrade, causing the hemisphere to radiate a beautiful deep orange color, providing vibrant contrast with the light purple plasma air. These experiments help engineering researchers understand the material’s behavior to extreme conditions that will be experienced during atmospheric entry, and thus inform the design of future spacecraft. The field of hypersonic materials is heating up and opening new opportunities to explore and understand our universe.”
Image of Research is an annual multidisciplinary competition celebrating the diversity and breadth of student research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The graduate student edition is organized by the Scholarly Commons of the University Library and the Graduate College. The 2022 competitions are supported by a gift to the Scholarly Commons from Mrs. Mardell J. O’Brien.
The semi-finalists were chosen by an interdisciplinary panel who judged entries on connection between image, text, and research, originality, and visual impact. In addition to the People's Choice award, First, Second, and Third place, and Honorable Mention prizes will be awarded.
For more details about the competition, see the Image of Research website.