Tag: 2016 AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition

Educators Incorporate Engineering Principles Into Student Learning

Panelists: Moderator Meredith Drosback, assistant director for education and physical sciences, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President; Edward J. Coyle, John B. Peatman distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology; Kirsten Fogg, STEM engagement lead, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center; Kurt Long, aerospace engineer, Experimental Aero-Physics Branch, NASA’s Ames Research Center; Thea Sahr, director of programs, DiscoverE

by Hannah Thoreson, AIAA Communications

Engineering principles can be challenging to incorporate into student learning, but educators and engineers who participated in a panel Jan. 7 at the 2016 AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition in San Diego have ideas about how to encourage more engineering thinking in learning environments.

“The next generation of STEM workforce is critical to maintaining the nation’s leading role in an increasingly competitive world economy,” said Meredith Drosback, assistant director for education and physical sciences with the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, as she kicked off the “Putting the ‘E’ in STEM” panel.

Thea Sahr, director of programs at DiscoverE, gave her organization’s Future City competition as an example of a hands-on project that teaches students engineering skills.

“There’s been more of a movement to get more project-based learning into schools,” she said.

Kirsten Fogg, STEM engagement lead with NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, and Kurt Long, an aerospace engineer with the Experimental Aero-Physics Branch of NASA’s Ames Research Center, also stressed the need to give students hands-on projects with real design constraints.

“We try to develop programs that get that hands-on experience into the classroom, whether it’s K-12 or college-based,” Fogg said.

Long emphasized the importance of internships as well as hands-on projects.

“The way you learn and become a good engineer is to fail,” he said. “We want students to get that experience of failing and learning from their mistakes.”

At Georgia Tech, there are difficulties to getting more undergrads to assist in research, according to Edward J. Coyle, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the school. He cited institutional barriers, such as the semester-based academic calendar and divisions between academic departments. Despite those barriers, Coyle has incorporated students into his research.

“If you create something of interest to people, they’ll want to be engineers,” he said.

Video

All 2016 AIAA SciTech Forum Videos

Robert H. Liebeck Delivers AIAA 2016 Dryden Lectureship in Research

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Robert H. Liebeck, Boeing Senior Technical Fellow, AIAA Honorary Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

by Lawrence Garrett, AIAA Web Editor

Robert H. Liebeck, senior technical fellow at Boeing, delivered the 2016 AIAA Dryden Lectureship in Research on the evening of Jan. 5 at the AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition in San Diego. The lecture was titled “Blended Wing Body Technology Readiness.”

John Vassberg, Boeing technical fellow and chief of aerodynamics for Boeing research and technology, introduced Liebeck as a “world renowned authority in the fields of aerodynamics, hydrodynamics and aircraft design” and the “co-inventor of the blended-wing body concept.”

Liebeck’s lecture took the audience through a comprehensive overview of the development life cycle of the blended-wing aircraft — from the early BWB concepts first created in 1989, through the completion of the test program on April 9, 2013 with the final flight of the X-48C demonstrator.

A big obstacle was getting the flight mechanics robust enough for a blended-wing aircraft to fly like a regular airplane and be lightweight, Liebeck said.

“It was a real challenge to get the inertias close, to have a dynamically scaled airplane,” he said.

According to Liebeck, a full-scale airplane, with flight-control hardware active, endured 250 hours of tests at the full-scale wind tunnel at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

“To be able to go into a wind tunnel with, in essence, a full-scale airplane was special,” he said.

Liebeck said the BWB project was 50 percent Boeing and 50 percent NASA and that the 2007 X-48B configuration was featured in TIME magazine “as the second best invention of 2007.”

Calling the X-48B flight test program a success, Liebeck said the transition to the X-48C, the low-emission concept evolution, with its two bigger, higher-thrust engines, is the direction the BWB concept is headed.

Liebeck said that 30 X-48C test flights were completed, and that overall, the whole X-48 project saw a total of 122 test flights. Although the X-48C is on display at the Air Force Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base and the X-48 equipment is in storage, “those airplanes are still flyable,” he said.

As a result of the two-decade-plus project, Liebeck said that a robust set of BWB flight-control laws have now been developed and verified.

“We can build the airplane,” he said.

Asked by a member of the audience when a production model might be built, Liebeck said if it were up to him, it would be tomorrow.

“All I can say is, hey, you can build one of these, and I think you can now … Oh, it’d be higher risk than a tube and wing airplane, but I don’t think there’d be any showstoppers.”

Video

All 2016 AIAA SciTech Forum Videos

U.S. Science and Technology Enterprise Requires Realignment to Current Strategic Threats

Paenlists: Courtney Stadd, management advisor, Catalyst Partners LLC (moderator), Mark Albrecht, chairman of the board, US Space, LLC; Carissa Christensen, managing partner, The Tauri Group; Jacques Gansler, distinguished professor, University of Maryland; Daniel Goldin, chairman, president & CEO, Intellisis Corp.; and Timothy Persons, chief scientist, U.S. GAO.

by Lawrence Garrett, AIAA Web Editor

Panelists kicked off the 2016 AIAA Science and Technology Forum and Exposition in San Diego Jan. 4, 2016, with a discussion on the current state of U.S. aerospace science and technology policy and many of the associated challenges facing the new administration, as well as private industry, beginning in 2017.

Timothy Persons, chief scientist with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, pointed to a number of challenges, including the growing number of patents being created in Asia and Europe. Persons suggested that a U.S. science and technology reboot is needed and that it should focus on international “collaboration,” noting that in the past, agencies like NASA and the Department of Defense have had success accomplishing goals through international partnerships.

Persons also said that setting risk tolerance is very important.

“We have a lot of resistance to failure, particularly in our political circles — [and] that’s not what’s incentivized and rewarded, and yet failure is often a very good teacher,” he said. “There’s a need to incentivize manufacturing innovation.”

Jacques Gansler, a distinguished professor at the University of Maryland, said that to overcome the government’s cultural resistance to innovation, there must be a recognition for the need for change and leadership that wants to make such changes.

Gansler noted that every time there’s an example of waste, fraud and abuse, Congress passes another law that results in more regulations. He said the current code of federal regulation is now more than 280,000 pages and that the cost (to government and industry) is estimated to be more than $1.75 trillion. Gansler said it’s imperative that many of these regulations are removed.

Mark Albrecht, chairman of the board with U.S. Space LLC, said that one of the biggest challenges is “that very littlethat government S&T is working on is directly focused on technologies to meet critical requirements to service a strategic objective that is well-stated, clear and adequately resourced.”

He said that while there are wonderful activities happening in avionics, thermal and propulsion, they’re not focused on any strategic mission.

“In my time, I have never seen a dearth of a strategic overview for the United States national security and foreign policy in the 35 years I’ve been doing this,” Albrecht said. “I mean, you can’t really point to what our strategic objectives are.”

Looking ahead to the arrival of a new U.S. presidential administration in 2017, Albrecht said the big challenge will be to develop a strategic context for how the U.S. looks at its national security problem facing real threats.

Carissa Christensen, managing partner with The Tauri Group, said that she agrees that the federal research and development enterprise is underfunded and that the science and technology enterprise is not well-aligned with the current threat environment. She touched upon how industry has a key role in innovation, calling the American space industry an “S&T success story.”

“Behind that [success] are space companies and an investment community that are putting capital at risk,” Christensen said. “They’re innovating rapidly. They’re operating globally, not being driven by traditional space actors.”

She said that in many cases, these companies are moving at a faster pace, geared more toward Silicon Valley than to Washington, D.C., and more aligned with the world environment.

Daniel Goldin, chairman, president and CEO of Intellisis Corp., mentioned five key points for how U.S. science and technology should move forward.

He said that there has to be more responsibility and accountability; that America’s education programs need to improve; that no program should last more than two presidential terms unless it can show why it’s in the national interest; that there needs to be increased competition; and, when referring to where additional needed science and technology funds could come from, that the U.S. should cancel 20 percent of the programs.

“They’re dead,” he said. “They don’t need to be there. We can’t have three and four decade programs for high profitability for their shareholders.”

Video

All 2016 AIAA SciTech Forum Videos