AME Trojans Win Big at AIAA Student Conference 2023
Last week, the 2023 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Region VI Student Conference was held at the University of California, Davis from March 25-26th. We are pleased to congratulate our AME 441 students who placed winning entries:
1st Place Team: “Low-Cost Airfoil Yaw Probe for Motorsport Applications” by Alvin Ahn, Daniel Bae, Jude Nejmanowski, and Matthew Pozzi
2nd Place Team: “Human Hand Orthosis Actuated by Shape Memory Alloys for Space Applications” by Olivia Acarregui, Niki Ekstrom, Bradley Martin, and Jack Onufer
1st Place Individual/Duo: “Characterization of Low Thrust Non-Conical Cold Gas Thrusters” by Benjamin Martin and Armen Aroutiounian
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AME Department Chair Paul Ronney spoke with the winners, who praised the expert guidance of their AME 441 instructors - Robert Antypas, Saakar Byahut, Akshay Potnuru, and Yann Staelens.?
AME 441a is the capstone design class for student groups to design, build, test, and refine a product to solve an engineering challenge proposed by themselves, faculty, or industry sponsors. By the end of the semester, they must arrive at a solution backed by rigorous testing, experimental data, and refinements, while also fulfilling class requirements. This involves several intermediate reports, a final report, a formal presentation to their peers, and a poster presentation to guests from industry and academia.?
The best projects are chosen to represent USC at the AIAA Region VI Student Competition every year, and USC students have made our department proud by scoring wins consistently over the past couple of years.
"Once again we had a very successful and diverse set of senior projects covering all aspects of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering which collected top honors at the AIAA Region VI student conference," said Yann Staelens, Associate Professor of Engineering Practice.
Akshay Potnuru, Lecturer of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, said “we had a great semester of senior projects with projects varying from SAE racing to Smart materials with shape memory alloys; rocket cold gas thrusters to novel aerospace engineering applications. The students worked hard the short 16 weeks with high perseverance to produce award worthy projects with continuous guidance and oversight of our strong 441 team consisting of several instructors of various specializations; versatile staff and teaching assistants.”