Coursework - Florida Tech
School Projects
Selection of some notable coursework projects from Florida Tech featuring a minimum length 2D rocket nozzle design through the Method of Characteristics and ball and beam controller design.
Learn to apply class theories in solving engineering design problems in their entirety ranging from nozzle contour design to controller design and validating them by simulation results or analytical solutions.
AEE 3162 - Compressible Flow · Grade: 100
Minimum-Length 2D Rocket Nozzle
Minimum length, shock free 2D nozzle design for the expansion of air from stagnation state of 1500 kPa/1000 K to 101 kPa ambient pressure with Method of Characteristics featuring a 50 wave expansion fan. The characteristic mesh was solved completely (1325 grid points) using a customized code in MATLAB. Newton-Raphson based inversion of Prandtl-Meyer function was used to solve the characteristic equations. The exit Mach number was calculated as 2.41 while 53.74% of stagnation enthalpy was converted to kinetic energy, which is theoretically the maximum possible at that pressure ratio. The computed area ratio was within 0.305% from 1D isentropic calculation due to discretization of mesh.
Skills Learned
AEE 4014 - Controls · Grade: 87
Ball & Beam Control System
A second-order transfer function of a ball and beam control system was estimated from frequency domain data using the command tfest in MATLAB. The function was then tested against a SimScape plant model. Two controller designs were carried out, with the Lead-Lag compensator (gain=40, lead zero and pole at 1.5/25 and lag zero and pole at 0.1/0.01) performing with an RMSE of 0.0817 when tested against the SimScape model. The other design was a PID controller tuned to give a 60° phase margin (Kp=48.71, Ki=4.23, Kd=140.31), which gave an RMSE of 0.0394 and 6.06 s settling time against a desired 6 s.
Images coming soon
Skills Learned