Ph.D. Student Conducts Research That Takes Flight
TRANSCRIPT
Nickolas Payne (Ph.D. MAE Student): I’m looking to explore a technology that improves the performance of electric airplanes and to validate it. Improving the lift capability of air foils that can be applied to electric aircraft. This is the air foil that I'm working with, but we’re just testing a cross section to see how it performs when air flows over it, how much lift it produces, how much drag it produces.
You want to have a fan or some compressor in here that accelerates the air, so instead of just kind of flowing over once, it recirculates. So it’s being sucked in through here, it comes out faster, and it blows over the air foil. And what the recirculation of air does, it improves the lift.
If you imagine like an aircraft that was trying to take off, you could have like a shorter landing strip because the aircraft, it’s already producing enough lift to get off the ground without having its like highest speed, just because of this little device. The ultimate goal is to save energy by using this.
Fossil fuel aircraft only has those two sensors of power that are kind of producing the forward thrust. An electric aircraft, you can wire up a motor, you can attach that at many different points along an aircraft, so you can have propulsion coming from many different points. Electric aircraft could potentially just do this more efficiently because you’re not making any energy conversions.
The Morel Fellowship, now that I got the fellowship, I’m much more at ease because I can focus on my studies, and it was it was it was a blessing in many ways. And I like the facilities and the people here. Everyone’s been very nice. I can do research that I really want to do, and they care. That’s important. Everyone is really kind.
