This year’s Boeing AerosPACE contingent traveled to Georgia Tech at the end of August to kick off the program.

The students met their counterparts from Georgia Tech, Brigham Young University, Tuskegee University and Clemson University, and engaged in team-building activities with their teammates. They also heard from the Boeing sponsors of the project about the application of skills learned in this program to future careers.

AerosPACE is a Boeing-sponsored, award-winning, multi-disciplinary, and multi-university collaborative capstone program bringing together stakeholders from industry, academia and government to build core competencies for the next generation of aerospace innovators in a sociotechnical, collaborative environment founded in the learning sciences. Students in the course work as a single, integrated team with students from the other universities.

In the fall semester, students focus on the conceptual, preliminary and detailed design of aircraft (with an emphasis on unmanned aerial vehicles) to satisfy the requirements of the design challenge. Toward the end of the fall semester, students transition toward prototyping their design. In the spring semester, students complete construction and flight test their vehicle to deliver a complete, validated vehicle by the end of the course.

Collaboration between students at different universities is a major theme of the project. It is expected each design will address technical areas of aerodynamics, materials, propulsion, manufacturing, structures, controls and related topics. The design process will be modeled after the NASA systems engineering workflow and include conceptual design, preliminary design, and detailed design. Prototyping and design for manufacturing will also be milestones of the project.

This is the 5th consecutive year Purdue has participated in AerosPACE.

Photo: Purdue students, left to right, Mitansh Tripathi, Steve Hannah, Rawin Pinkoh, Forrest White, George Xu, Pasita Pibulchinda and Sarah Inzinga