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Not Grounded in Conventional Thought

Gary Coleman and Amit Oza knew they had a rare opportunity as graduate students – take an idea and turn it into an operational and productive Aerospace Vehicle Design Laboratory. The results created by the two aerospace engineering majors and the lab’s director, Assistant Professor Bernd Chudoba, have been greater than they expected; they just received a NASA contract to evaluate potential technologies for commercial transport aircraft in the year 2025 and later.

Gary is pursuing a Ph.D. degree; Amit an M.S. Both were students of Dr. Chudoba when he was at the University of Oklahoma, and both decided to follow him to UT Arlington’s College of Engineering when he came here in the fall of 2005.

“I went to Dr. Chudoba for advice on how to get into conceptual design for civilian aircraft,” Gary recalled. “By a strange coincidence, just a couple of days earlier he had received a request from a private space venture company, Rocketplane, Ltd., to evaluate their design of a sub-orbital tourist aircraft. He needed assistance on the project and asked me to help. It was just the challenge I was looking for. Though the project was finished when he came to UT Arlington, I followed.”

Amit’s situation was a little different. “I just liked Dr. Chudoba’s robust teaching style,” he said. “He draws concepts from several disciplines to propose solutions to theoretical and real-life problems. It develops a creative way of approaching situations, of seeing that answers aren’t always from one source.”

The driving philosophy for creating the Aerospace Vehicle Design (AVD) Lab was to develop and apply a flight vehicle design simulation environment; this has already been applied to business jets, commercial transports and space access vehicles. These simulation and evaluations help decision makers to thoroughly explore design options and provide a means of assessing design risks. To do this, the researchers follow a three-step process: Consider the mission specifications – what is being attempted and under what conditions and restrictions; evaluate the proposed design concept – can it meet performance specifications in a safe and efficient manner; emulate flight test and incident/accident investigation scenarios – use computer simulations to assess their expectations of the control and performance of the proposed aircraft.

The team has built an impressive knowledge base to accomplish this – a treasure of developmental tools, things from powerful optimization and simulation software to handbooks produced by aircraft designers from the 1940s to today. Since this “toolbox” is constantly validated with realistic design information from past projects like the Concorde and the Space Shuttle, the AVD Lab team is in the position to apply it to unique design problems such as the supersonic business jet, the hypersonic transport aircraft and others.

A unique and valuable resource is the archives of Vought Aircraft Industries in Grand Prairie. Vought is the creator of such fabled aircraft as the F4U Corsair fighter of World War II and the F8 Crusader, the first supersonic carrier-based fighter.

Dick Atkins is the archives director and chief historian of the Vought Aircraft Heritage Foundation, a group of Vought retirees who maintain an engineering library that aids in the restoration of Vought’s historical aircraft. They support the AVD Lab by providing unlimited access to library materials. “We’re excited that Dr. Chudoba and his students are using past experiences, the lessons learned, to create better and more economical products,” Atkins said. “It’s too often the case that lessons taught are not learned, thus errors are unnecessarily repeated.”

“One thing that current students need to understand is that today’s engineers must look beyond just the technical aspects of a project,” Atkins continued. “Engineers now must consider the financial, administrative and marketing sides of the job. They have to really know the customer and how the customer operates; it’s organizational and developmental philosophies. We hope to be a continuing source of information that aerospace design students can use to get a more complete understanding of the overall process that goes into creating a new aircraft; why it looks and performs as it does.”

In addition to the information gleaned from simulations and books, the AVD team consults with active and retired designers, flight test engineers and safety investigators. Input from experts in diverse fields is essential in designing modern aircraft; technologies such as composite materials and canard wings are increasingly used as engineers try to meet the aviation industries’ demand for more efficient and environmentally-friendly designs.

“One thing we discovered,” said Amit, “is that we are continually melding old tools and knowledge with the new. It’s a screening process to find out what works best.”

Boeing’s Advanced Product Development group recently recognized UT Arlington’s AVD Lab as a center of excellence for aircraft synthesis on par with universities such as Georgia Tech, Stanford, Purdue, Virginia Tech and MIT, who are also providing input to Boeing. The AVD team believes their project for NASA will open additional doors to collaborations with aircraft and spacecraft manufacturers. “Having a NASA imprimatur greatly boosts our reputation as a ‘go to’ source for authoritative, unbiased assessments,” said Dr. Chudoba.