Jordan Carman

Coursework

Aircraft Design

Senior students perform a team-based aircraft design, requiring application of the education and skills developed in the aerospace curriculum. Aircraft mission requirements include engine cycle selection and airframe/engine integration, performance, stability and control, structures, human factors, avionics, sensors, and manufacturing processes. The teams present oral and written reports on their designs.

Flight Dynamics & Control

Flight vehicle rigid-body equations of motion; linearization via small perturbation techniques. Trim analysis, static and dynamic stability, aerodynamic stability derivatives and control effectiveness. Vehicle transfer functions, stability augmentation, aircraft handling qualities. Introduction to flexible vehicle effects.

Tools And Methodologies For Designing Systems

Introduction to modeling tools and methods for designing engineered systems. Topics include: defining the design problem; defining and validating stakeholders’ and system requirements; discrete mathematics for system modeling; defining and modeling system operational scenarios; the system development life cycle; defining and modeling functional, physical, and allocated architectures; evaluating and modeling the trade-offs between alternative architectures; and defining the system qualification process.

Dynamics & Vibrations

Kinematics and kinetics of particles and rigid bodies. Topics include a particle in orbit, systems of particles, vibrations, Euler’s equations of motion, Eulerian angles, and aerospace vehicle dynamics.

Control Systems Analysis

Modeling and analysis of dynamical systems with aerospace applications. Laplace transforms, transfer functions, block diagrams. Transient and steady-state response of dynamical systems. Root Locus, Bode, Nyquist methods for control systems analysis. Introduction to controller design.

Air-Breathing Propulsion

Basic operating principles and analysis of performance characteristics of propulsion systems for air-breathing aerospace vehicles. Ramjet, turbojet, turbofan and turboprop cycle analysis. Propeller analysis and design. Analysis of flow through inlets, combustors, nozzles, compressors, and turbines. Component matching.

Product Data Management

This course provides an understanding of the types of data generated and used in the product lifecycle, the current tools and methodologies in the management of that data, and system analysis and implementation techniques for using PDM as the backbone supporting a company’s product development and implementation activities. Interaction between various enterprise systems is discussed.

Fluid Mechanics & Aerodynamics

Viscous and inviscid incompressible flow. Lift and drag in subsonic flow. Introduction to compressibility and boundary layers. Potential flow. Incompressible airfoil and lifting line theory. Steady and unsteady, one-dimensional, linear and nonlinear flows. Normal shock waves. Steady, supersonic, two-dimensional linear and nonlinear flows. Oblique shock waves. Perturbation theory for wings and bodies. Design applications.

Thermodynamics I & II

First and second laws of thermodynamics, entropy, reversible and irreversible processes, properties of pure substances. Application to engineering problems. Properties of gas mixtures, air-vapor mixtures, applications. Thermodynamics of combustion processes, equilibrium. Energy conversion, power, and refrigeration systems.

Aerospace Systems Design

Aerospace system lifecycle and design process. Stakeholder needs elicitation and requirements generation. Quality function deployment and hierarchical objective trees. Concept generation and creativity techniques. Introduction to safety, risk, cost and value analysis. Critical evaluation of the applicability of systems engineering techniques in specific contexts. Application of these techniques to a team semester design project.

Technical Writing

Workplace writing in networked environments for technical contexts. Emphasizes context and user analysis, data analysis/display, project planning, document management, usability, ethics, research, team writing. Typical genres include technical reports, memos, documentation, Web sites.