Biometric Door Lock
Biometric Door Lock This one started as a low-grade arms race with my fraternity brothers. They had a habit of getting into my room and messing with my stuff, and the house’s master key made it easy at first. I bought a new doorknob that didn’t match the master key, so they picked the lock. […]
Maximum Lift Wing: A Rotating-Skin Airfoil
Maximum Lift Wing: A Rotating-Skin Airfoil This project started with a question I asked my professor after an aerodynamics lecture on the Magnus effect, which is the phenomenon where a spinning object generates lift because of the pressure difference it creates around itself. I asked him: what if the skin of a wing moved like […]
AAE 590ACA Final Project: Low-Thrust Trajectory Optimization to Asteroid 16 Psyche
AAE 590ACA Final Project: Low-Thrust Trajectory Optimization to Asteroid 16 Psyche This was my final project for AAE 590ACA at Purdue, completed with a teammate, Abran Cruz-Portillo. I later used the work from this project as the basis for my senior design project. The goal was to develop a minimum-fuel, low-thrust transfer trajectory from Earth […]
Popping Popcorn in Lunar Gravity
Popping Popcorn in Microgravity: A Blue Origin Flight Payload I worked on this project as part of Purdue’s AAE 41800 Zero-Gravity Flight Experiment course, which partners students with Blue Origin to design real flight payloads for the New Shepard rocket. My teammate and I picked up an ongoing project from a previous semester’s team: using […]
Venus Atmosphere Sample Return Mission
Designing a Venus Atmosphere Sample Return Mission I worked on this project as part of Purdue’s AAE 251 Introduction to Aerospace Design course, where my five teammates and I (Team R204) were tasked with designing a full spacecraft and mission concept from the ground up. Our goal was to design a rocket capable of traveling […]
What Neil deGrasse Tyson Taught Me About Talking to People Who Aren’t Engineers
A few weeks ago I went to “The Universe Is Absurd,” an unscripted conversation between Neil deGrasse Tyson and William Shatner at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. What I got was two hours of two very different people thinking out loud together about space, their trip to […]
How Robotics Competitions First Made Me Love Engineering
I first realized that I was not just a destructive child who liked breaking things apart when I was eleven years old. I programmed a Lego robot to do something I wasn’t sure if it could actually do, and lost my mind when it did it. It was my first robotics competition, and I had […]
Why I Build Things That Might Not Work
When people think about aerospace engineering students, they probably picture someone buried in problem sets, solving differential equations at 2 a.m. And yeah, that’s part of it. But if you ask me what’s actually shaped the way I think as an engineer, it’s not the homework. It’s the random stuff I built just because I […]