As many students across campus close out the semester with final presentations to professors and peers, a team of four students has been preparing to show their work to a different audience: NASA engineers.
Since August, the students have worked on a project to design an inflatable, deployable airlock, a container that can move astronauts safely from one pressurized environment to another — think transfer from a spacecraft to a habitat on Mars, for example.
Currently, airlocks are made of metal. But the development of an inflatable, fabric-based version would save money for NASA, explains the team’s collaborator Russell Smith, an engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center. “On the space shuttle, it cost $10,000 per pound to get mass into orbit,” he says, money that could be spent on more astronauts, food or gear, for example. It was Smith who wrote the solicitation for the project as part of NASA’s Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge, funded via the National Space Grant Foundation.
NASA’s Smith was on hand at UVM on April 28, along with Langley colleague Kevin Roscoe, to see the student’s final work, a prototype of how air could inflate tubes that would push open the structure’s end cap.
Rather than design a single inflatable chamber, the students relied on the use of air beams, vessels of air that form a halo of strong columns to hold open an inner chamber. The benefit of this design, says senior Joseph Maser, is that it relies on separate air systems for the air beams and the airlock chamber, so the structure can stay inflated even when the inner chamber is devoid of air.
The UVM team — which included mechanical engineering majors Maser and John Draper, electrical engineering major Meghan Donovan, and Juan Lattanzi, an aerospace engineering student from Universidad de Leon in Spain at UVM for a year abroad — was one of five collegiate groups across the country working on X-Hab projects. The grant came to UVM thanks to a proposal submitted by Professors Darren Hitt, principal investigator and director of the Vermont Space Grant Consortium, Dryver Huston and Mandar Dewoolkar.
Over the course of their nine months on the project, the students racked up hundreds of hours designing the version for space and then building a prototype that could demonstrate the concept here on Earth. They logged hours of presentation time with NASA, too, Skyping in with the collaborators to get approval on their designs.
It was a window into the world of engineering work and an impressive resume item for the four seniors, about to launch their careers as they graduate this year. Maser, who begins his first post-grad job in June, says the project came up in his interview and likely helped him land a position as a consultant on air systems for a company based in Stamford, Conn. — work that directly relates to the air system design he helped create for X-Hab.
The X-Hab project was just one of dozens of real-world problems and products UVM engineering students worked on this year as part of the Senior Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) program — a capstone on UVM’s undergraduate engineering curriculum. Hours after demonstrating their work to NASA, the X-Hab team joined their fellow students at the annual Engineering Design Night at the Davis Center, where all 30 projects were on display.
The SEED program structure, Hitt says, was likely an important factor in UVM being chosen for the award, as one of NASA’s goals for X-Hab is to connect with senior-level curricula that “emphasize hands-on design, research, development and manufactur(ing).”
The work the X-Hab team took on was especially challenging. “There’s a reason there’s not a lot of people working on deployable, inflatable airlocks,” Smith says. But what the team accomplished, he says, is a “great first step toward solving a very, very challenging problem.”
The team has just one presentation left: they’ve been accepted to speak at the International Space Station Research and Development conference in Boston in July, a conference that showcases space-related innovations, breakthroughs and discoveries across industry and academia. On top of that honor is one exciting detail: “Elon Musk will be there,” Maser says with a smile.
