Five papers written by Vaughn engineering students were accepted for presentation this November at the Mid-Atlantic Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) regional conferences.

The AIAA meeting, held on Friday, November 2, 2012, at the Kossiakoff Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, featured papers of interest to the aerospace community by young professionals including graduate, undergraduate and high school students. Manny Santana presented a paper co-authored by Jennifer Vasquez entitled “Aerodynamics Airfoil Configuration,” which investigated how the application of a dimpled surface configuration, similar to that of a golf ball, might affect a proposed aerodynamic wing to promote lift and reduce drag.

Dominic Elrington and John Andon’s paper, “Lift Force Performance of a Car Spoiler at Curvatures,” sought to investigate and characterize the aerodynamic performance of an automotive wing placed on the rear side of a car model using computer flow modeling tools. The study focused on defining optimum AOA (angle of attack) at different turns, at different speeds, to increase the vehicle stability.  Dr. Amir Elzawawy who served as advisor on both papers attended with student presenters.

For the ASEE mid-Atlantic conference, three papers were accepted for presentation, but the conference, which was slated to be held on November 2 in Toms River, NJ, had to be cancelled due to hurricane Sandy.

The accepted papers were: “Spacing Design between Two Neighboring Circular Holes – An approach based on PATRAN-NASTRAN Finite Element Analysis” by Jonathan Sypeck; “Liquid Automated Cooling Immersion (L.A.C.I)” by Jordan Whylie, Shahidul Islam, and Bridgette Valencia and “Pressure Distribution of a Bolted Joint Assembly Using CATIA FEA Workbench” by Khadijah Stewart.

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Vaughn students with advisor (from left):  John Andon, Professor Amir Elzawawy, Dominic Elrington, Manny Santana