AAE 45100 Student Teams tie for win in a NASA Unmanned Aerial Systems Design University Challenge

Two teams from the Spring 2013 semester AAE 45100 Aircraft Design course tied for first place in the NASA Aeronautics Research Directorate-sponsored University UAS Design Challenge. The teams, both advised by Professor William Crossley, were led by senior undergraduate students David Bitter and Matthew Block.

Members of both teams are in alphabetical order: Tayler Adolphson, Charles Beacham, Derek Berg, David Bitter, Matthew Block, Christian Coakley, Jase Deffibaugh, Benjamin Dunajeski, Roy Fisher, Ki Ryng Go, Aaron Johnson, Kathryn Juskevice, Zachary Lapetina, Jong Seo Lee, John Sabol, John Scott, Andrew Verhamme, Curtis Wassum, and Leah Wise.

The Spring 2013 AAE 45100 Aircraft Design course put teams of students to work on a proposal in response to the NASA UAS Design Challenge. This competition invited student teams to develop a system that uses unmanned aerial vehicles to combat wildfires using a scenario set in the year 2030, with a severe drought over a large swath of the continental United States. Wildfires had been commonplace and firefighting resources, both personnel and equipment, had been stretched to their limits. Another large fire broke out and was expanding, threatening nearby homes, schools, and businesses. The incident commander called for the use of unmanned systems to help battle the blaze. The challenge was to design an unmanned aerial firefighting system to put out the fire.  In response to this, the AAE 451 class concentrated on the design of one new unmanned aerial vehicle, but the efforts also included consideration of an overall architecture of multiple systems that work to combat and stop the scenario-defined wildfire.

Team 2; led by David Bitter, concentrated their efforts on a small, turboprop-powered Short Take-Off and Landing (STOL) aircraft concept that could carry a 700-gallon payload of water and has a predicted takeoff gross weight of 11,980 lb.  Sixteen of these STOL aircraft would work along with eight larger water bomber aircraft, which the team assumed would be an unmanned version of the Be-200, and one off-the-shelf reconnaissance / observation UAV to fight and extinguish the scenario wildfire in 32 hours.

The focus concept of Team 3; uses an amphibian blended-wing body, twin-turboprop water bomber concept that enables the aircraft to refill with water payload by scooping from bodies of water nearby the fire, or from tanker trucks stationed at runways.  Team 3’s proposed system architecture included eight of these large UAVs, which have 3,300-gallon payloads of water mixed with chemical retardant additive, to extinguish the scenario wildfire in 45 hours.  In predicting the size, weight and performance of their concept, Team 3 used recent NASA reports and papers describing design studies of blended wing body aircraft to predict a maximum takeoff gross weight of 101,000 lb.  Matt Block led Team 3’s submittal to the NASA competition.

Team 3's Amphibian Blended-Wing Body Firefighting Aircraft Concept

The teams were judged on innovation and creativity, cost and effectiveness of the system, ease of use and operations, and NAS integration impact. In tying for first place, the Spring 2013 AAE 45100 teams followed a tradition of having Purdue teams earn recognition in this nationwide, NASA-sponsored competition during the past several years.

For more information regarding this challenge, please visit the NASA University Contest webpage at
http://aero.larc.nasa.gov/university-contest/