Daedalus team members (front) Deyzi Ixtabalan, Ruby Gomez, (back) Gaines Gibson, Lauren Brunacini, Donovan Stallings, Jesse Banks and Joey Paz.
Daedalus members took top honors at the AIAA Region VI Student Conference held in Salt Lake City last month. Of the four papers submitted by ASU to the technical paper competition, three were among the top awards.
The team’s outreach program continued a long winning streak in the community outreach category, taking first place this year. Daedalus has hosted more than ten outreach events over the past year. Throughout the year, team members visit classrooms and work with younger students to teach them the basics of rocketry through water-bottle rockets and Estes kits. The team estimates that they will reach over 2,000 K-12 students this year, not including their participation in ASU-hosted events like Engineering Open House and Earth and Space Exploration Day.
The team will represent ASU at the AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting in January 2014.
In the team category, open to undergraduate and graduate students, the solid rocket propellant team’s paper on a Crawford Strand Burner took third, edging out rivals at USC. The pressure vessel simulates the extremely high pressure inside a rocket motor, but in a controlled environment. This enables measurement of the burn rate and characterization of small strands of solid rocket propellant at different pressures.
In the undergraduate category, Gaines Gibson took third place with a paper on aerospikes, which manipulate compressible flow to continuously compensate for changes in altitude up to the design altitude.
The AIAA Student Conference is a technical paper competition for AIAA undergraduate and graduate student members. Students from around the region give formal presentations and are judged for technical content and communication skills. The top three winners in each category receive a cash prize.
More on the conference: region6.aiaastudentconference.org
More on Daedalus: daedalus.engineering.asu.edu
