- work -

One of the purposes of this site is to showcase my employability. To that end, I am making available some of the projects I have been working on.

Erosion Profiling from IEPC 2007

Calculating Sputter Rate Angular Dependence Using Optical Profilometry. This paper proposes using an eroded cylinder to calculate the angular dependence curve for sputter yields. It is a pretty good idea, but I assumed a monoenergetic collimated ion source when i was actually using a 200w Hall Effect thruster. This turned out to not be a very good assumption so the results are a little screwey. We are planning to try it again with a better plasma environment.

Surface Sputtering and Redeposition from JANNAF 2007

Sputter Validation of the Coliseum Framework. That is all I am allowed to say because of ITAR restrictions. This paper is Distribution C, but I assure you, it was awesome.

Masters Thesis

Modeling Differential Charging of Composite Spacecraft Bodies Using the Coliseum Framework. Even the title strikes fear into all those who read it - and with good cause! It is 116 pages of irritating. For a quick overview of the results I recommend the JPC paper, which is only a few pages and has most of the results. The point, though, is that now I am the master of sciences!

Spacecraft Charging Paper from JPC 2006

This is a paper I wrote for the 2006 Joint Propulsion Conference. It is some results from my thesis research on differential spacecraft charging of composite surfaces. It was cool because I got to fly out to California to present it and I had a fairly large audience. I also have included my presentation since it contains a few results that were not finished in time to make it into the paper.

M2P2 AIAA

Senior year of undergrad I did some research with Dr. Wang into M2P2 (mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion.) It is basically a large plasma bubble that acts as a sail in the solar wind from the sun. Anyway, I presented this paper at a regional AIAA conference in May. It is some pretty neat stuff, you can have a sail size of tens of kilometers compared to a solar sail size of less than one kilometer. You can also have variable launch dates and approach angles and such. It also allows for speeds of ~ 100km/s. A sweet ride....

Mars ISiRUS

This project was for my senior design team. The basic idea is that at some point in the near future we may want to terraform Mars. In order to do that you will need lots of hydrogen (In-Situ Resource Utilization Support.) Hydrogen can be used to make fuel, water, oxygen, etc. through a variety of chemical reactions. So our job was to design a mission that would get 150,000 kg of hydrogen to Mars in a 30 year period. We ended up with a craft weighing over 15,000 kg (mainly due to hydrogen weight) that leaves every 2 years plus a few days when Mars lines up with Earth. This paper had 10 authors so it is pretty long. Fortunately, the AIAA limited entries to 100 pages. It would still be a marathon read.

Scientific Data in 3D Virtual Environments

Recently I did a study in the VT CAVE, which is a virtual reality type room where you wear some glasses and everything looks 3D. It's called the CAVE because there are 4 walls that are projected onto so you are almost all surounded. I think it is also likely some achronym for something possibly ending in virtual environment. Anyway, i was studying how to view complex scientific data in the CAVE. In reality I just wanted to make a plasma visualization program, but we had to make a study out of it to get credit so that is what I did.

LEO Interactions

I recently wrote a term paper on spacecraft environment interactions in low Earth orbit. It gives a summary of all expectected reactions - how they occur, how they affect the spacecraft, etc. It also includes a more in depth discussion of physical impacts from meteorites and spacecraft debris. This paper isn't particularly good, but not many people know about this sort of stuff since most of it is still largely unknown. That is why it is neat.

Collisionless Flow

This paper was for my aerodynamics class. It is a desctiption of collisionless flows. If the flow is low enough density, such as in LEO, you can make a bunch of simplifications about flow properties. This paper goes over how to determine flow type and if the flow is considered collisionless, how to get the pressure and lift coeficients. This paper was not what I was intending to write, but the guy said it had to relate very closely to class (be about pressure and such.)