In the past 2 months, the Mach2.5 project has gone from just some render on Fusion 360 and Shapr3D along with paper sketches, to a full fledged group project, with 3 people including myself working on different systems of the craft with one single goal; reaching Mach 2.5.
Tayson Neely, a student at the University of Illinois at Springfield, along Wesley Micklus, have begun working on standardization, assembly and manufacturing as well as the control and guidance systems of the craft. Along with the tremendous amount of orientation and “getting team members up to speed”, there have been quite a few things going on in my life. The semester began with quite a furor, and excitement; only to devolve into rapid pace and disorientation.
Along with these projects, my health decided to yeet itself across the spectrum of healthy and crazy fucking dastardly. The shortage of doctors and medical professionals that treat neurological disorders has proven to be a large and impacting factor to the further delay. Anyway, a possibility of multiple sclerosis and sinus infections aside, autumn has really been an “oof”.
CFD Simulations
Simulating aircraft in CFD software has been an annoyingly annoying challenge. First of all, there’s limited documentation for openCFD. Whatever exists, its often redundant or outdated. Furthermore, it runs on CPUs alone, there have been optimizations for GPU expansions with foamEXTEND, but that has been limited in terms of documentation as well. Fortunately, SimScale had an academic plan they could offer for our projects and pounced at the opportunity. But, there have been workarounds that can execute on the hundreds of GPUs we have in our lab, its just that all of the process has to worked on with ‘C’. And yes, it obviously has its own caveats and fallacies, although it is quite promising.
What next?
As the team works on certain parts of the aircraft, Josh (our faculty guide), Tayson and I will majorly shift our focus on the AIAA DBF 2023-24 competition. The goal is simple, to excel enough that we are in the Top 5. This year’s challenge is fun, in fact its crazy fun. There are huge decisions to be made, from wing placement and chord lengths to fabrication and material selection. Its a maze so hard to solve, that craziness is the preface to work on it, at least when the last aircraft or “aero” -stuff you worked on was over 4 years ago.
That said, there will be parallel work on a lot of the systems that go inside the aircraft. A lot of it will remain secret as guidance algorithms that are fine-tuned for Mach flight will not be the best thing in terms of long term public interest. That said, we might release a “watered-down”, much somber and “domestic-friendly” version of the things used. Furthermore, we will make a large part of the project public, due to the extra processing that was made available, multiple other iterations and versions that I wanted to try could be possible.
What becomes public?
A LOT OF IT!
- The Aircraft blueprints
- Circuit designs
- RTOS implementation
- Signal Processing
- Signaling and data transfer protocol used for TTs and other modules
- ML/DL models optimized for Mach 0.8 flight.
- Control Schematics for hydraulics, fuel, lubrication and fluid management
- Control Loops for FADEC/SCADA systems as well as basic FMS AI, again up to Mach 0.8.
There might be changes to this list and in the end we might not release anything at all, but as it stands, we hope to make a lot of it open-source and available to the public, because aviation is fun and as useful as it is, gravity is a big buzzkill for a lot of fun shit we can think of doing.
Until next time,
Mihir.
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