Build Like a Mechanical, Think Like an Aero

Design Lab at Rensselaer
If you’re going to build for an aerospace engineer, you have to think like an aerospace engineer. That insight may be obvious but it’s not innate—which explains why many mechanical engineering students come to campus without it.

“Most engineering school problems are designed to teach one concept,” said Mark Steiner, director of the Design Lab. “We address diverse concepts from diverse disciplines in each project, which is why we put interdisciplinary teams together. It’s the kind of situation students will find in industry when they graduate.”

“Mechanical engineering students hear terms like fixed wing design and wind tunnel and say, ‘We’re not aeros,’” said Scott Miller, a project engineer at Rensselaer’s O. T. Swanson Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory, a.k.a. The Design Lab. “I say, ‘That’s not the point.’ Ninety-five percent of an aircraft involves mechanical engineering anyway. So mechanicals need to speak aero.”

They certainly needed to speak aero in spring 2013, when Rensselaer’s undergraduate subsonic wind tunnel needed an upgrade. Until that time, the tunnel accommodated testing with one degree of freedom: pitch. Aerospace students, however, needed to run experiments with roll and yaw as well. So the Design Lab assigned a team of students to collaborate on the upgrade.

The key word there is collaborate. Since 2001, the Design Lab has assigned cross-disciplinary teams of undergraduates to collaborate on real-world engineering problems supplied by Fortune 100 companies, not-for-profits, and other School of Engineering departments, among others. The goal, on the student side, is to hone skills they will need after graduation—including teamwork.

“Most engineering school problems are designed to teach one concept,” said Mark Steiner, director of the Design Lab. “We address diverse concepts from diverse disciplines in each project, which is why we put interdisciplinary teams together. It’s the kind of situation students will find in industry when they graduate.”

The first student wind-tunnel team spent its semester defining the requirements (for load, speed, and other variables), designing the frame, and building the vertical axis, which would facilitate lift. The fall 2013 team focused on design of the roll and yaw capabilities, while in spring 2014 the students designed the control software. All told, students in mechanical, electrical, and computer/systems engineering collaborated on the upgrade.

As with most Design Lab student projects, learning about collaboration was a work in progress. “Students come in very compartmentalized,” Steiner said. “The student selecting the motor for a project says, ‘I’ll give you all the torque you need and then some.’ Meanwhile, the student designing controls says, ‘But if you do that, how do I make the control stable and avoid backlash?’ That’s where they have to work together.”

In the process, they learn that engineering is not just about the big picture. “The students love this kind of project because they get to build things,” Miller said. “They think they can visualize the whole process at the outset, but inevitably they come across unexpected challenges. It’s a tremendous lesson in the importance of details.”

The redesigned wind tunnel will give aerospace students hands-on experience at a higher level of complexity to complement what they’re learning in the classroom. At the same time, the advanced electronics will eliminate the need for cumbersome mechanical changes in setup, allowing students to set up and take down faster and thus have more time for their experiments.

The collaboration on this project, as with many Design Lab projects, went far beyond the students. Design Lab staff, including Miller and technician David DeJulio (who manages wind tunnel operations), provided guidance to the students and worked closely with each other on the project. Boeing provided funding for the materials used in the upgrade, and Simmons Machine Tool Corp. offered its plant equipment to mill certain components.

“When we talk about the low walls at Rensselaer,” said Steiner, “we don’t just mean between faculty and students. The collaboration is high between faculty and staff, between staff and students, across departments, in many dimensions.

“Most important, we teach all our students collaboration, in every aspect of every project. When they come out of Design Lab, they’re far more prepared to be engineers in the real world.”

Students who worked on the Wind Tunnel Improvements project meet with James McNerney, CEO, Boeing during a recent visit to Rensselaer.