AIAA Foundation Announces Winners of Its 2015 - 2016 Undergraduate Team Engine Design Competition Written 8 September 2016

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AIAA Foundation Announces Winners of Its 2015 - 2016 Undergraduate Team Engine Design Competition

September 8, 2016 – Reston, Va. – The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of its 2015–2016 AIAA Foundation Undergraduate Team Engine Design Competition.

This year’s contest required teams to design an engine for a futuristic jet trainer that would replace the T-34.

The winners are:

First Place: The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, “Team KU-TF-Claws Engine.” Team lead: Kyle P. Thompson. Team members: Daniel Fought, Weiting Liu, Timothy Luna, Andrew Shirling, Zach Smith, and Charles Yeo, Farokhi Saeed and Ray Taghavi, faculty advisors.
Second Place: Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, “Team ITU BeEngine.” Team members: Orcun Bulat and Olcay Sari. Onur Tuncer, faculty advisor.

Third Place: University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, “Team Bearcats.” Team lead: Michael Denton. Team members: Vaughn Bostwick, Trace Taylor, Seth Young, and Richard Zelinksi. Faculty advisor, Hamed Awatef.

“The annual Team Engine competition is a vital function of AIAA and the Air Breathing Propulsion Committee Branch,” said Jimmy Tai, engineering manager at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the competition’s organizer. “It serves to keep undergraduates interested in gas turbine propulsion related fields, which are currently underrepresented in the undergraduate curriculum. This year we received 13 entries from 11 different universities, four of which were international. This has been a major increase relative to recent years. A panel of industry, university, and government judges reviewed the reports to select the final three teams to present this week at AIAA Propulsion and Energy 2016.” Tai concluded, “All of the judges said that they were extremely impressed with both the engineering quality and professional presentation of the entries received. We look forward to building this competition in the future to include more international participation and increasing the number of first-time participants.”

For more information about the AIAA Foundation Team Engine Design Competition, please contact Rachel Dowdy at racheld@aiaa.org or 703.264.7577.

About the AIAA Foundation
The AIAA Foundation seeks to “make it exciting, make it empowering, and make it fun.” That simple, compelling philosophy drives the Foundation’s commitment to math, science, and technology education. The AIAA Foundation offers a wealth of resources to support educators from K–12 through university: scholarships, classroom grants, design competitions, and student conferences, improving scientific literacy and advancing the arts and sciences of aerospace. For more information on the AIAA Foundation and its programs for students, teachers, and professionals, please visit www.aiaafoundation.org.

About AIAA
AIAA is the world’s largest technical society dedicated to the global aerospace profession. With more than 30,000 individual members from 88 countries, and 95 corporate members, AIAA brings together industry, academia, and government to advance engineering and science in aviation, space, and defense. For more information, visit www.aiaa.org.

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