AAE grant winner presents research, chairs session at AIAA conference
A travel grant from Purdue’s Women in Engineering Program helped AAE Ph.D. candidate Samantha Alberts attend the AIAA Propulsion and Energy Conference in Cincinnati this summer.
Alberts presented her research, “Low-Gravity Fluid Modeling of the Robotic Refueling Mission 3 Cryogenic Storage Tank,” as well as chaired a session on propellant storage and management.
Alberts said research she did while interning at NASA Glenn Research Center translated into some of her Ph.D. work. She did modeling to show what the fluid configuration should be in microgravity given different volumes of low-temperature propellants.
“They use it for different propellant gauging devices, rather than having to do what they currently use, which is like a bookkeeping method of, ‘OK, we’ve burned for this long so this is probably how much fuel we have left.’ It’s not as accurate as you would probably want it to be,” Alberts says.
Alberts says the source tank with the propellant management devices in it for the Robotic Refueling Mission 3 is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station in November.
Alberts says she enjoyed the AIAA conference, especially considering it had a twist. Not only did she present her research, chair a session, and attend a technical committee meeting that allowed her to network, she did it all with then-1-month-old son Joey tagging along.
“AIAA was pretty excited. They were calling him their youngest member and took a picture,” Alberts says, smiling. “So he enjoyed his first conference. Cried through a couple of talks, slept through a couple more.
“All in all, it worked out really well with him, and the amount of networking and experience and things that I got out of it, it was definitely worth going.”
Alberts is defending her Ph.D. dissertation Oct. 10. She already has a job lined up at Phantom Works, Boeing’s advanced technology organization within the company’s Defense, Space & Security business unit.