The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or AIAA, sets requirements for student teams around the world to design, build and fly small, high-performance, remotely controlled aircraft and enter them in its international aircraft design competition.

Teams are scored on their design report and competition performance. Aircraft requirements this year include the ability to carry a payload of hockey pucks and fly around a track specified by AIAA; aircraft also need to fold and fit inside a launch tube for storage and protection.

The team opted for a high, straight-winged monoplane with a U-tail empennage and pod-and-boom fuselage configuration. The aircraft uses composite materials to minimize weight and increase performance. The wings fold and stack on top of each other and the tail booms telescope into the fuselage to allow for packing in the tube. Numerous numerical, ground and flight tests were done to validate and improve the design before the competition date.

Sensitive electronic devices powered by 28-volt direct current military vehicle electrical systems need surge suppressors to ensure that transient voltage surges, spikes and ripple are within acceptable limits. Commercially available suppressors don’t fit the sponsor’s products, so the team was asked to design a small surge suppressor that would not require a costly and time-consuming redesign to implement.

The team’s design allows modern systems with sensitive electronics to interface with a wide range of military platforms and replaces bulky passive components with two metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors, or MOSFETs, configured in series to dissipate 100- and 250-volt surges and spikes as required by military standards.

The control circuitry allows for this dissipation to occur in two stages before finally clamping the output voltage at 33 volts. The intermediate clamping voltage between the two MOSFETs was tuned so that both components experience uniform heating.

Onsite high-g shock testing of electronics components for the sponsor’s products can be expensive and time-consuming. Coordinating the shock and data-collection aspects of a missile launch in a laboratory simulation would be quicker and less expensive, and could negate the need for a field test.

The objective of this project is to design a robust, high-g shock-delivery system that simulates the set-forward forces created by shoulder-fired missile launchers. The design uses compressed air to induce a shock to a fixture with a mounted test specimen.

Energy in the compressed air is transmitted to the fixture by applying a pressure differential across a pneumatic striker subsystem, rapidly accelerating a steel plunger into the baseplate. Shock data is acquired via accelerometers affixed to the baseplate near the test specimen.

The sponsor’s manufacturing plant uses surface-mount technology to manufacture automotive infotainment systems. Reels of components for surface-mount devices are loaded into surface-mount equipment that needs to be replenished frequently. The sponsor is interested in implementing smart wearable technology to improve this process.

The goal of this project is to develop an application that allows Vuzix M100 smart glasses to interface between manufacturing operators and equipment, simplifying the installation of component reels. The system scans the barcode on the supplied reel, queries the database, and uses an algorithm to determine which machine the reel should go in.

Once the line, machine and slot numbers are determined, the graphical user interface displays the required information to the user and provides interactive guidance to locate where the reel should be installed.

Sensitive electronics need to be shielded from shock and vibration but mitigation methods are time-consuming and expensive. The goal of this project was to design a variable durometer 3-D printer that can facilitate the implementation of shock and vibration mitigation in devices subject to vigorous motion.

A 3-D printer was modified for compatibility with a dual extruder and Diamond Hotend mixer. The printer varies the durometer, or hardness, of the material it is printing by feeding hard and soft filaments through the specialized hotend at variable rates dictated by the dual extruder.

The team developed software to postprocess existing dual-extrusion G-code, a machine tool programming language. The software replaces the extrusion values for specified tool changes with the respective ratios of filament that create the necessary durometer. The printer then prints the part with the specified durometer at locations chosen by the user.

The goal of this project is to improve the time required to create a high-quality 3-D-printed component. The team designed an automated magnetic tool changer for an existing 3-D printer.

The modification maintains existing printer capabilities gives 3-D prints a precision finish using end mills, drills and other machining tools. The new tool mount is attached magnetically to the printing head carriage, and tools are mounted on the printer frame for easy access by the carriage. Tools can be picked up and returned swiftly and precisely by the carriage and returned to their original positions when not in use.

Bisbee, Arizona, is situated in a steep-sided canyon with thousands of steps providing access to residences. Goods must be transported to residents’ homes manually, which is unsafe, inconvenient and a deterrent to people moving to the city, whose residents need a safe and easy way to get items to and from their homes.

The objective of this project is to design a system for transporting items up and down the city’s steep hills. The system consists of several posts holding up a set of rails that carry a cart designed to hold whatever needs transporting.

The cart is pulled up the railway by a winch controlled by a Bluetooth keypad and Arduino Uno microcontroller. The city of Bisbee intends to offer this system to residents who request installation in their area.

Helminthic therapy uses the natural immunosuppressant properties of hookworms as a remedy for autoimmune diseases and disorders. The U.S. Food and drug Administration has not approved helminthic therapy, and current methods of administering and dosing are impractical for mass commercial adoption.

The semiautomated system devised by the team requires minimal handling of infectious material, provides highly accurate dosing of Necator americanus helminths, and meets all FDA criteria for market approval. The design includes a helminth incubation and cultivation system, including a temperature sensor and hygrometer, which houses the helminth culture and provides a continuous supply of infective Necator americanus larvae.

The team also developed a helminth dose dispensing system: a photo-detection apparatus consisting of a glass microfluidic chip, optical fiber photo gate, pumps for worm fluid flow, and a microcontroller subsystem for overall procedure control.

The sponsor asked the team to design and build a test platform to measure the felt recoil of a variety of shoulder-fired weapons. Felt recoil is the energy experienced when discharging a firearm.

The test platform consists of a weapon-containment structure, a remote trigger actuator, and a data-acquisition system that includes an impact sensor and an accelerometer. The weapon-containment structure allows free movement of the weapon in three directions. The remote trigger actuator accommodates triggers with various weights and lengths of pull.

The weapon can be fired from 15 feet away for safety. The impact sensor measures the energy in the axial direction while the accelerometer measures the acceleration of the weapon in the pitch, yaw and axial directions. The acceleration in the axial direction provides correlation of the impact sensor reading.

The goal is to create a cost-efficient, high-precision, real-time kinematic GPS for mining. These systems consist of a base station and rover unit, both with the same components, which communicate with each other via radio modems. The base station is placed at a precise, professionally surveyed GPS location. It sends correction signals to the rover, which then calculates its own highly accurate GPS location.

In the design team’s system, the high-precision location of the rover is sent to an iPad via a Bluetooth low-energy module. The team designed a power system that provides power to the unit from within the case without outside assistance. The device can withstand the harsh conditions typically found in a mine.

The system interfaces with the sponsor’s existing data-storage application found on iPads placed in mining equipment. The system is accurate to within 15 centimeters up to range 4 kilometers between units.