May 7, 2018
Barnacles stuck to the wind tunnel lab for years on end, Tynan, Brandon and Shaun of Lost Coast Surf Tech hit a major win last week at Cal Poly’s Innovation Quest - $5000 to keep their startup dreams alive!
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Barnacles stuck to the wind tunnel lab for years on end, Tynan, Brandon and Shaun of Lost Coast Surf Tech hit a major win last week at Cal Poly’s Innovation Quest - $5000 to keep their startup dreams alive!
Cal Poly PROVE Lab finally unveiled their solar-powered world land speed record challenger last week! In about 2 months’ time the record attempts will be taking place at Palmdale, CA. In the meantime, watch aerospace engineers Will Sutton and Lacey Davis describe how the car works. FLIP was the testing and design partner for the car, nicknamed “Dawn” by the team.
Geary Yu and Alex Meraz are sponsored by the College of Engineer's Summer Undergraduate Research Program, and are working with FLIP and our client Tesla to look at a specific automotive aerodynamics problem that is helping the Tesla engineers understand whether small changes in bodywork can make a big difference in boundary layer behavior. Last week, Geary and Alex presented their results to Tesla's aerodynamics team in Hawthorne, CA. We'd love to show you a picture of that, but it's NOT ALLOWED. So here's a picture at the massive supercharger station outside the design studio instead.
Dr. Graham Doig and undergraduate researcher Danny Stalters presented at the CLEO 2017 conference in San Jose as invited speakers in the Quantel/Optical Society Foundation "Bright Ideas" session. They described their innovative work on real world automotive aerodynamics, and how the team plans to incorporate some world-first laser measurements into future testing.
Teams in Dr. Doig's Aerodynamic Research and Development course got a tour from Cal Poly Aero alum, Nick Brake, of ES Aero's brand new SLO facility. ES Aero are prime contractors on NASA's cutting-edge electric concept plane, the X-57. The innovative company was founded by and is filled with Cal Poly Aero alums!
Many Cal Poly undergrads are interning as research assistants and wind tunnel engineers this summer with FLIP - some of the team took a trip to Goleta-based FLIR, the world's number 1 company for thermal imaging. Infrared thermography is increasingly used at Cal Poly to visualize flow phenomena like boundary layer transition, and FLIR recently donated two Tau2 cameras to the lab to expose more students to FLIR's technology. Same as everywhere we go, Cal Poly alums were all over the facility, happy to see the next generation of Mustangs.
This quarter students in AERO 529 have had a lot of Flow Control Fridays (TM) in the wind tunnel lab, getting to know the technologies (and troubles!) companies are using to dramatically increase the aerodynamic performance of flight vehicles.
Cal Poly aero junior Graham Rolph (left) and Dr. Graham Doig were 3d scanning pelicans and turkey vultures at NASA Ames last week - part of a long-running effort to do some of the world’s first bio-realistic wind tunnel testing on large gliding birds. Thanks so much to Kurt Long who let us use their 3d scanner to generate millions of points of the geometry in a matter of seconds.