Eppes, Milanovic, Shetty, and Daly Present Paper at Conference in India

Professor Eppes presenting at the conference.

Jenna Daly, undergraduate student in mechanical engineering

Tom Eppes, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, CETA; Ivana Milanovic, associate professor of mechanical engineering, CETA; Devdas Shetty, professor of mechanical engineering, and Jenna Daly, mechanical engineering student, presented a research paper at the International Conference on Innovation and Trends in Applied Computing (ITAC), which took place in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India, in February.

The paper, "Characterization of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Wing Design," describes the aerodynamic characteristics of a single wing design for use in an unpowered vehicle. A 2D computational fluid dynamics model was developed to predict key performance parameters. The lift/drag ratio is of primary importance to ensure the vehicle has the required glide range. The model was developed with the COMSOL 4.2 computational fluid dynamics module using the single phase flow interface with low Reynolds number k-e turbulence model. Studies are conducted for angles of attack from 0 to 15 degrees at a mean velocity of 70 m/s corresponding to a Reynolds number of about 50,000.

This work was initiated and done in-part during the new course ES 591 Multiphysics Modeling and it can be found in the ITAC 2012 proceedings published in the book form: Eppes, T., Milanovic, I., Shetty, D. & Daly, J. (2012). Characterization of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Design. In M. Kshirsagar, B. Patil, U. Gawande, L. Manzione, D. Shetty, & T. Eppes (Eds.), Proceedings of International Conference on Innovation and Trends in Applied Computing (pp. 3-6), Nagpur, Maharashtra, India. Support of WELFund and Dorothy Goodwin Summer Scholarship is gratefully acknowledged.