Suzanne: You know when you look at the
sky and you see birds and you see stars
you're always attracted to the different
perspective, I think, that offers.
I think that's what
attracts people to flight.
Michael: I've just always been
interested in planes. My mom
tells me that when I was younger
I'd wake up early before school
and watch the movie Top Gun,
but I would actually fast-forward
every part of the movie that
didn't have a plane in it.
Once I got here and actually
found out that I could do this
stuff and work with the planes,
it was just kind of a given
that I was just going to do it.
Suzanne: At the University of Kentucky,
students and faculty researchers
are looking into problems that
are at the state of the art in
the research into flight.
Flight is such a broad area of research
and there's so much yet to be discovered.
Everyone who works on these
problems brings a different
perspective, and because of that
research is always full of possibilities.
Sean: You can only learn
so much in a classroom.
By bringing those students out
of that classroom and into
the lab, they actually get to,
it goes back to the creative process
where they're actually building something.
They're getting that extra
hands-on learning experience
and it tends to cement,
what they're learning in the classroom.
For their senior design project, the
students are building and designing
an Unmanned Sensor Vehicle
to support my research.
These UAVs are going to be
used to measure atmospheric
turbulence near the ground.
This sort of data will help
us to better understand
how surface and atmospheric
conditions produce turbulence.
Ultimately this information, this
understanding, will then be used
to produce better climate and
weather models. And we can even
use it to better improve the
safety of take-offs and landings
around airports in bad weather.
Scott: My name's Scott Ashcraft.
I'm a mechanical engineer
here at UK, and I'm also
the team lead for a
senior design project that
works out of this lab
called the BLUE CAT project.
My name is Michael Thamann.
I'm a graduate student here at UK in
the Mechanical Engineering Department
and I'm a researcher in the UAV lab.
At the moment, the only way this lab
survives is by passing on information.
One of my job description,
title things is that I have to
teach Scott and teach Sam, who's the
other undergrad that works for us,
try and teach them everything I know.
Michael: You don't want to
have any brush marks in it.
So, you'll want everything
thick and smooth and
so just keep reiterating to
yourself, thick and smooth, thick
and smooth, thick and smooth.
The BLUE CAT Project, you
know, what Dr. Bailey needs to
conduct his research is a plane
that can fly as fast as possible,
as close to 100 miles per hour as
possible, and then fly as close to the
ground as possible, and he
wants to do this for an hour
to get as much data as he can.
Sean: With a UAV, what you can do is, you
can go out, you can fly and you capture,
within a short period of time,
you can capture a lot of data.
The motivation for doing research is
just, it's always fun to do something new
that nobody else has done before.
Research is basically just the
quest for scientific understanding.
It's finding the pieces
to a broader puzzle.
First, you have to find the piece and
then you have to fit it into the puzzle
and ultimately you want to step back
and take a look and see what the puzzle,
the picture of the puzzle is showing you.
The faculty and students
really work together as peers
in a lot of circumstances
to plan and conduct the research.
They begin maybe as a student
not understanding as much,
but they become a peer,
and they learn to love it from someone
who's already loved it before them.
Sean: In high school, I actually
wanted to be an architect
and as I went through
the application process
to become an architect, I realized
that the parts of architecture
I really liked were actually
engineering aspects. So I
applied to engineering schools.
All of a sudden I was exposed to this
world of labs and lasers and wind tunnels.
I really enjoyed my Master's, so
then I went and I did a PhD because
my Master's was a lot of fun.
Then when I was done with my PhD,
I was still looking for more ways
that I could continue this enjoyment.
That morphed into finding
a faculty position.
Sean: If we take a bundle of those lines,
so basically if we draw a circle around
a bunch here and we encompass
those lines altogether,
that becomes our vortex tube.
So it's always the same
set of lines at all times.
I'm Mark Miller. I'm a second
year Master's student here at
the University of Kentucky.
I'm working down in the
fluid mechanics lab studying
turbulent boundary layers and
turbulent interactions with roughness.
Well turbulence is probably
familiar to most people,
although they might not be aware
of it. If you mention turbulence,
generally they think airplanes, bumpy
flows, the airplane bouncing around.
But also if you think of a rushing
river, the kind of chaotic,
random, unsteady rotational motion
that's involved: all those eddies
and swirls and random motions.
Turbulent flow is difficult to
understand because it's full of
all different kinds of things.
When you're in a plane and you're
hit by turbulence, what is actually
happening is the plane is being
buffeted by eddies of different sizes,
which causes different vibrations
in the plane. It's been an
on-going dilemma that people have
still not been able to solve,
even over a hundred plus years.
The fun part about turbulence is
that there's so many questions.
We lack a full, complete
understanding of what's going on. There's
so many different, complex interactions
that are involved in this problem.
Roughness is one of the things
that causes turbulence, and
we can actually simulate that
in a tunnel with a rough
surface. The rough surface
has tiny little cracks in it.
We can actually inject air
into that flow. So you have
this turbulent flow coming in,
we inject air in and then
see how all those eddies
and all the different
components of velocity interact.
Mark: Herb just made these with
threaded rod and bent them.
This is the way the new one is.
Mark: I had Dr. Bailey for
my undergraduate Fluids
class and he actually,
after class one day, I mentioned,
"Do you have any way I could
work down in the fluids lab?"
I saw wind tunnels and like anybody
else thought they were pretty cool
and was just like, "Oh, I can do that."
He actually offered me a part-time job
as an undergraduate to work down
here, paid, so that was awesome.
Sean: It's my job to help
a student become a better
scientist, a better learner,
a better educator, a better
researcher, and a better worker.
Ultimately, just to train these people to
become the next generation of scientists.
Scott: Today, it's been a
while since we've been out
to the field and been flying,
so I'm just going to be taking
some of the trainer planes.
I'm just going to be going out, flying,
having some fun, and practicing.
You know, I've been in the lab working,
so it's going to be a good break
just to get outside and get flying again.
I'm telling all the BLUE CAT people,
I'm going to be scared out of my mind
to fly this thing for the first time.
Will it crash? We have all the models,
we do all the simulation we can
but it's hard to predict
what's going to happen
and how the plane's going to respond.
When it comes down to it,
it's all worth it in the end
when it does fly and does
do what it's supposed to.
Suzanne: I think people have a
natural curiosity to problem solve
and part of solving the problem
comes from understanding.
In order to build a taller tower
of blocks, you have to understand
how they fit together. But it turns out
that research and advancement in research
is really solving a set of small problems.
You take each problem in turn and you
answer that, and then the next problem
and the next problem and all
of those added together, not
only the work you're doing,
but the work that everyone else is
doing, becomes then an advancement
to the body of knowledge
and the result of research.
Michael: My name is Michael Seigler.
I'm an Assistant Professor of Mechanical
Engineering at the University of Kentucky.
In engineering, we're usually
trying to develop something.
We have a specific problem
that we want to solve.
I try to work on the simplest problem
that I can come up with
that I think represents,
at least approximately, the
problem I'm trying to solve.
Michael: This shows that the
nanowires can have an effect.
John: My name is John Calhoun and I'm
finishing up my second year of grad school
here at the University of Kentucky.
The project I'm doing, it's
ultimate goal, is research into
drag reduction on a surface.
Michael: You need to have
specific motions to reduce drag.
One way that we're looking at
doing it is to use these nanowires.
So these would be wires that are grown
on the surface of the bounding wall.
These nanowires are active, so
if you apply voltage to them
you can move them back and forth.
If you can actuate them correctly, this
gives you the appropriate motion you need
to do things like reduce drag.
The great thing about these piezoelectric
nanowires is you wouldn't see them
and they're scalable and so you could
apply them to a very large surface.
If you actuate them correctly,
you could put them on airplanes,
on the wings, on the fuselage.
Working with nanowires, you
can imagine, is difficult.
Things are small. So what we did is
we sort of scaled the experiment up.
We scaled the wire surface up. We scaled
the flow up. We scaled everything up.
If we can look at the flow and
see how it disturbs the flow,
then we can apply that on a nano-scale.
Michael: It's definitely hitting
the wall and doing something.
John: Yeah, I was getting
all the way to the top of it.
Michael: I always liked math. I
was good at it in high school.
But I was told mathematicians
don't make a lot of money.
It's hard to find a job, so I was
told engineering was the place to be.
I suppose it's like asking
someone why they like fruit.
You just sort of like it, you know?
I think it's the mathematical nature of it
and it's the idea of posing a
problem that you can then solve.
That's what's interesting to me about it.
In my little high school, we didn't have
a vocational school or anything like that,
but I knew I liked working
with my hands and I knew I
liked growing up building Legos
and K'NEX and Erector
sets and things like that.
It was early on that I was like, "I like
this." I like working in a lab setting.
I like trying to learn new
things and applying them.
I guess that'd be another reason
I came to research is because
it makes you keep learning.
Scott: This is hands-on, build
it, fly it, just have fun.
I joke about it, like,
this really isn't work.
I don't want to say I wouldn't
work in here if I wasn't paid but
I probably would. It's just
a lot of fun, you know.
You always can be laying up
parts, or working on a mold,
or building a plane. It's not
sitting behind a computer.
So it's just, it's great.
Michael: When the undergrads do get
their stuff together and it does fly,
and they do have something built
and put together, you know,
it's a success for them, but
also I feel like it's a success
from my point of view as well.
Just because, you know, I was down here,
I may have been working on my own stuff,
but I was watching them make the mistakes
that I know they're going to make
and then resolve them
and do things like that.
I feel like a proud little Papa Bear.
We're actually getting stuff
done. We're getting stuff built.
You're not buying it and
putting it together, but
you're actually designing it.
So your design work and spending
all that time just staring
at a computer is worthwhile
because it actually works. And
then when it flies, it's just
something completely different.
Michael: Whenever I was a kid,
I was always taking stuff apart
and building stuff with my dad
and just around the house
with Legos and stuff.
I had two huge bins full of Legos that
I'd always just build random stuff with.
Scott: I just always loved
working with my hands, you know.
Just that satisfaction of doing
it yourself and once it's done,
you can say that that's yours and
you did it, and that was always
just really rewarding to me.
Scott: Wait, wait, wait...
Scott: We've been working a lot.
Actually have the plane, all
the mechanical stuff, finished.
We actually did a test out in
the Engineering Quad yesterday.
We were kind of taxiing around the
courtyard, just testing it out.
ENGINE STARTS UP
Scott: The plane's ready to go.
It's good to finally see it
together and so close to flying.
Suzanne: The principles of math
fit into flight in the same
way that the principles of math
fit into many, many subjects in science.
That is, math becomes the language
for which you can understand
and communicate problems in
flight, or astronomy, or biology.
Jesse: My name is Jesse Hoagg.
I'm an Assistant Professor in the
Mechanical Engineering department.
I was good at math and good at science,
and I enjoyed both math and science.
A lot of people were like, "Oh,
you should be an engineer."
I thought, "Alright,
that sounds reasonable."
BJ: Hey.
Jesse: Hey, have a seat.
BJ: My name is BJ Wellman. I'm
just finishing up my Master's
in Mechanical Engineering here
at the University of Kentucky.
I've always been drawn to building
things, constructing things, being able to
move the world around me. I can look at
something random in the world and be like,
"Oh, this is the governing equation
for it," and it just makes me
a little happy on the inside.
Jesse: Okay, but I bet we can move that
center just like in the other case.
So then the last thing to do is
after we have these five rules, we
want to do examples for the paper.
Jesse: Control systems are
everywhere in what we interact with.
It's the system that causes an
engineering device to operate
in the way you want it to.
A good example is the
cruise control on your car.
So one of the things I like about
controls is that, as a topic,
it has lots of applications.
BJ: My research is an extension of
classical root locus techniques.
I first learned classical root
locus in my undergraduate
Controls class with Dr. Hoagg.
When we started working with
an extension of it, we just
wanted to do that tweak with it.
We wanted to figure out what happens when
you have a more complicated controller.
It's kind of a potentially
powerful project in the end
because root locus is a very
common control technique.
One of the things that we can do
with control systems in general,
specifically with classical
root locus, is the problem
called the Inverted Pendulum.
If you've got some kind of bar
that's standing straight up, you
want it to stand straight up,
how can I balance it?
When we put it into a control
system, we can have a compensator,
and it tells you, if you've
got a bad position right
here, how do you compensate?
And we can design that control system
so that it'll stand straight up.
Jesse: You want to be able to
demonstrate that the algorithm
behaves in sort of a good way.
It does the things you want it to do,
and things that you don't want it to do
don't just mysteriously happen.
So as you said, you can do algebra to
then solve your differential equations,
and then what we do is we magically
map back to the time domain
after we've gotten our solution.
It's not really magic. It's just
the inverse Laplace transform.
BJ: I took an undergraduate Controls
class which is required by everybody,
and there was a new professor, Dr. Hoagg.
The way he taught, it just made sense.
When I first started, he
was always supportive of me.
He didn't look down on me
as an undergraduate. He was
just as curious as I was.
BJ: It's a little tricky still. The root
looks like it's proportional to K cubed.
Jesse: Okay, so we do have to
do it though because I guess
we could have a D equals one.
Jesse: Exactly proper, yeah.
BJ: That just means the controller is...
Jesse: Exactly proper, yeah.
Jesse: Research is always changing.
There's always something new to work on.
That's the whole point of research
is never to sort of stagnate
and stay in the same place.
Scott: We finally have BLUE CAT
One assembled and ready to go.
Today is kind of the first opportunity
we have where the weather is decent.
If everything goes well,
we'll try to fly it,
but really it's just kind of our
first opportunity to get out there,
test things out where we can kind
of increase the speed a little
bit and see how it operates.
Nice day out!
Michael: Every now and then you've
just gotta stop being gentle.
I really want to clear tape over these
so they don't come off during flight,
if we do fly this thing today,
so I can actually have them
back to lab to trace off.
That's just...sick.
Scott: Close it a little more.
Scott: It was pretty cold. So we had a
lot of difficulties starting the engines.
Our starters didn't work well
so we had to try to start it
off with the car batteries.
ENGINE STARTS UP
Michael: Once we finally
got the engine started,
then we started to have the
wonderful problems that were
occurring with the actual throttle.
Brandon: Flip it?
Michael: Yeah, flip it.
ENGINE SPEEDS UP
Michael: Are you up to 107.5?
ENGINE DIES
Michael: I don't know.
Scott: We just couldn't
get it calibrated correctly
and that was kind of game
over, for the day anyway.
Michael: Anyway, we can
get Jefferson ready to go.
So that we can actually fly something
autonomously, for Brandon's sake.
Scott: Sounds good.
Michael: Can somebody grab the
Allen wrenches for this guy,
get the battery out of him,
get the batteries out of him. And then...
And then pull Jefferson out and
plop it somewhere in the sun.
Michael: If you let yourself get
down and think that you're failing,
you're never going to get whatever it is
done. The reason it's research is because
if it was easy, somebody else
would've already done it and it
wouldn't be research anymore.
Suzanne: The BLUE CAT project
is one that represents students
engineering, and designing,
and building, and testing
an important aircraft to
contribute to research.
How satisfying is it to create
something that hasn't been known before?
Scott: We rely on just teaching
others and passing down
what we've learned to others
so that when we're gone, doing
other things, that it's still here
and the knowledge base isn't lost.
Michael: It was almost feeling like
I was handing off my firstborn child.
But it's also good to have somebody
to pass on the knowledge to.
Scott: It's been a great experience
for me. I try to encourage
as many undergrads to come in
just so I can teach them what I know,
because other people did it for me.
I really want to try to give back to them.
Suzanne: There will always
been new students, and new
questions, and new faculty
that keep the university
alive and energetic and keep
the research process moving.
There will be different problems,
there'll be new opportunities
and I think people will always
be pursuing those, no matter
which direction they lie.
