Achieved top 6 research presentations at the ENAE100 culminating research fair.

I collaborated in a team of 8 students, 2 teaching fellows, and a faculty member to research, calculate, and experimentally measure aerodynamic forces on hypersonic airfoils in the HyperTERP wind tunnel at Mach 6.  Our goal was to determine numerical relationships between personally designed hypersonic airfoil geometry, lift, and drag.  We began by researching current airfoil designs and concluded that the conventional diamond airfoil would be most effective.  We planned on altering the thickness of the airfoil to change lift and drag characteristics, then by relating thickness to lift/drag ratio, determine the most efficient airfoil.  We 3D printed the airfoils in resin for its accuracy and smoothness.  We tested 5 different airfoils in the UMD Hypersonic Wind Tunnel, ranging from 0.05in to 0.25in thickness in increments of 0.05in.  Then, high-speed shadow imaging and MATLAB was used to analyze the movement of the airfoil through x and y position values, which then provided lift and drag coefficients to calculate the lift/drag ratio.

We concluded that as airfoil thickness increases, the lift coefficient increases, as does the drag coefficient.  We found the optimal airfoil to be the thinnest airfoil, which matches up with what we found in industry research, optimizing for reduced drag at hypersonic speeds.  There were some challenges in our research.  Notably, the MATLAB edge tracing software frequently was inaccurate, which resulted in inaccurate position tracking.  The airfoils were also positioned as close to the same AOA as possible, however, there was a margin of human error.  In the future, we hope to plot airfoil lift against airfoil weight to find an airfoil with equal lift to weight for neutral flight.  We also want to experimentally find the relationship between airfoil AOA and lift-to-drag ratio.  Finally, we want to experiment with non-symmetric airfoil geometry and find a relationship between airfoil maximum thickness chord location and lift-to-drag ratio.

Through this project, I learned about elementary hypersonics, hypersonic wind tunnels, high-speed shadow imagery analysis, lift/drag characteristics of hypersonics, and advanced MATLAB programs.