Aerospace Engineering Brown Bag Lecture Series, Carnell Lyon and Jerry Schweiger

The Feburary 25th AE Brown Bag Presentation featured Carnell Lyon and Jerry Schweiger
Carnell Lyon presented "Numerical Optimization for Air Vehicle Parameter Identification"
Projectile parameter estimation is a difficult optimization problem due to the extremely nonlinear behavior of a projectile’s flight dynamics. An optimization method that uses meta-optimization for estimating projectile parameters has recently been developed. Meta-optimization is theoretically more efficient than a regular optimization technique like gradient descent in that the meta-optimizer intelligently selects the best optimizer from a bank of optimizers for minimizing a given cost function at a particular moment. To validate the method, a meta-optimizer was written in Julia which is a programming language designed for high-speed computation. In this presentation, the meta-optimizer design process and theoretical solutions to its design problems will be discussed.
Jerry Schweiger presented "Non-Volatile Particulate Emissions from a High-Pressure Combustor Rig"
High-pressure, high-temperature combustion processes are common in many aerospace applications, particularly in the burners of jet engines and aircraft auxiliary power units. Elevated temperatures and pressures have the potential to increase combustion efficiency up to a certain limit, and as such it is of great interest to engineers to be able to manipulate these variables. One way in which this is done is by modifying fuel equivalence ratio, burning a fuel rich mixture to change output temperature. This comes at a price, however, and suffers the tradeoff of also increasing the amount of particulate matter output from the combustion process. Non-volatile particulate emissions (soot) and nitrous oxides in particular must be carefully studied in order to regulate their output, so as to minimize harmful environmental or health impacts. This presentation explores the setup and modeling of an experimental facility meant to study these non-volatile outputs in a high-pressure, high-temperature combustion rig burning a fuel rich mixture. System requirements and the subsequent design of a Unistrut stand and fuel pipeline and manifold for the rig’s fuel piston accumulator are discussed extensively.