I'm Back

So I have not written an update on anything in a while.  I'm going to try to keep up on weekly updates (for now at least).

Thesis Project:  QuadTiltRotor UAV

I had really wanted to make a QuadTiltRotor UAV powered by Jet Engines, but alas it seems that is going to just cost too much money.  Maybe someday.  Here are a few designs of the ICARUS Flyer v3-RevE:

And a  feature animation.  Anyways, so to limit the cost I'm going to be using more conventional DC Brushless motors instead.  According to my most recent spiral plan, I'm currently here:  

Here are the things that are keeping me busy lately:

• Learning Star-CCM, a CFD package that I'd like to use for flow analysis.
• Concept CAD work for ICARUS Flyer v4-RevA.  I have a lot of decisions to make before I even have a good concept, but this is fun stuff!
• Analysis on my APM Board.  The UIC AIAA Team is going to be using an APM2.5 on their plane I wrote some MATLab code to help with sensor analysis and hopefully system identification.  We will be performing our first data collection run with a flying plane on Saturday, hopefully everything works out ok.
• My advisor, Dr. Aggarwal asked me to give a paper presentation at the next AIAA Student Conference.  I think I'm going to do it on what I like to call "The Ideal UAV".  As I refine my abstract and outline I'll post on here more.

AIAA DBF Team

Lately I've been working a lot on different aerodynamics aspects of the competition.  We are trying to use Star-CCM with this team as well so the pressure's on.  As the Programming Lead I haven't been spending a lot of time lately on actual programming aspects for the competition, more just software consultation in general.  We have developed quite a few tools already this year that will hopefully make the next year even better, but we have some ideas for computer programs that if we have the time we'll develop this year, including:

• MATLab Interface for XFLR/XFOIL.  XFLR is a great (and free!) tool used for airfoil design/analysis but as a College Engineering Team we always want to optimize everything.  As such, we are planning on creating a MATLab GUI that would act as a front-end for a application that would process and optimize airfoil designs using XFLR.

Other Thoughts

I'm finding that it's becoming difficult to store in an efficient manner all the data that we're collecting for the different aspects of the different projects I'm on.  We have logdata from our APM boards, flow data from Autodesk Falcon, XFLR and Star-CCM, basic Aero & physical data from Excel, etc.  Hmm.  Is there a better mousetrap?

Personal Stuff

The wedding planning is going on as usual.  Norilyn bought her dress and I'm currently shopping for tuxedo's.  We are planning on sending Save The Date's soon, we're just waiting on addresses for now.