New achievements in rotorcraft education and research
New achievements in rotorcraft education and research
Professor Daniel Feszty and fourth-year students on the RUAS team pose with a Bell Model 429 at Bell Helicopter Textron Canada.
A newly initiated fourth-year rotorcraft unmanned aerial system (RUAS) project is already building on Carleton’s excellent reputation in aerospace education and research. The 23 undergraduate students involved in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering’s RUAS project are designing and building a medium-sized unmanned helicopter. The students work as a team, each taking on specific roles, very much like integrated product teams in the industry.
Still in the project’s early phases, the student have already formed the first Canadian student chapter of the American Helicopter Society, secured a gift from Bell Helicopter Textron to support the project, and met with industry leaders.
On 18 January, the RUAS team visited Bell Helicopter Textron Canada’s facility outside of Montreal. Bell Helicopter Textron is one of the largest aerospace manufacturers in Canada and is encouraging such learning opportunity to educate future aerospace professionals for the rotorcraft industry. The students presented their project to Bell’s engineering management team, which was impressed by the quality of work being conducted by these young engineers in training. After the students’ presentation, Martin Peryea, VP for Engineering at Bell Helicopter Textron Canada, presented the team with a cheque for $10,000, which will help the team build and test the rotor in the recently unveiled Carleton Whirl Tower Facility.
Carleton has one of the oldest and largest aerospace engineering undergraduate programs in Canada and was the first Canadian university to introduce team-based final year projects in aerospace engineering more than two decades ago. Carleton is also a Canadian leader in rotorcraft education and research: it is the only Canadian university offering an undergraduate level course on rotorcraft, while the Rotorcraft Research Group–which has graduated more than 30 research students in the past decade-–was, in 2012, the first in the world to demonstrate experimentally that stiffness control of rotor blades can lead to significant reduction of vibration. Carleton also designed and built Canada’s only whirl tower facility, the Carleton Whirl Tower Facility, located on the grounds of the Canada National Research Council in Ottawa.
Picture: Martin Peryea (VP Engineering, Bell Helicopter Textron Canada), right, hands over a cheque for $10,000 to the faculty representative responsible for Carleton’s rotorcraft project, Professor Daniel Feszty.
Picture: The Carleton University Students and their Professor pose in front of a Bell Model 429