Would anyone have any ideas that might make for a good aviation-themed final year undergraduate thesis project in physics/engineering? I’ve been trying to think of aviation based projects to run for a few years but haven’t come up with anything good. I was thinking about maybe some Arduino-based TCAS/traffic alerting system but I guess there are loads of plans on the internet which reduces the challenge somewhat. Really anything that would be useful and a good learning experience (no harm if a small business comes out of it!)
“Why certified private (noncommercial) GA doesn’t work” would be a good one. But, not much physics/engineering. 
Super capacitors used in electric and or hybrid electric airplanes ? They can be made for several MW in short bursts. A short burst of power, say a minute or less, would be very beneficial for an airplane, even if that burst only adds 20-30 % more power. I have no idea if it is feasible (size, weight and so on)I have only read about them in balancing of power electric grids.
A final year engineering degree project is a significant project, expected to take ~200hrs – or at least it was in my time. And keen students will spent a lot more time to do something really good.
A good topic would be how to develop the control loop parameters for a GA autopilot.
This is a well established activity for airliners, where a lot of work goes into developing the flight behaviour model so that a full motion simulator can be built before the plane flies. Even in the days of Concorde (which flew in 1969) they built a full motion sim which apparently flew accurately.
But in GA this seems to be done by guesswork. Accordingly a lot of installations are not stable.
Yea in terms of scale it’s 12 hours a week for approx 20 weeks of the timetable dedicated to it. Both of those sound interesting. Would be nice if the budget stretched to a GFC500 which could be deployed elsewhere at the end of the year
My only experience with control loops was a module on the topic not much short of 20 years ago so I’m not sure I could offer the required support!
Maybe check with the http://stratux.me/ team and see if they have cool projects on the back burner? I donated my homemade portable wing leveler to them; if someone wants to iterate on it I’m sure that it could lead to some interesting discussions.
Couple of old vids about the wing leveler:
I’ve far too little free time these days, but if I ever get some, I’ve always wanted to develop an autothrottle for SEP aircraft.
An autothrottle is a complex piece of kit, but imagine if you could crack an algorithm for an SEP aircraft.
LeSving wrote:
“Why certified private (noncommercial) GA doesn’t work” would be a good one. But, not much physics/engineering.
That would imply that is doesn’t work, while it works perfectly well.
Anyway. Do you intend to do research or engineering?
italianjon wrote:
An autothrottle is a complex piece of kit, but imagine if you could crack an algorithm for an SEP aircraft.
Why is that? To me it appears very simple. More so than an autopilot.
List the various scenarios regarding power density of batteries for the next 5-10 years and based thereon describe the various options to electrify light GA 4-seat aircraft (electric, parallel hybrid, serial hybrid). Include thin film solar panels in the equation.
Depends how much science/hardware/software you want, I personally did think of:
- Hardware: designing a GA AoA indicator and robust ASI from two pitot tubes and integrating it into display (EFIS warnings) or even active controls, most of it is hardware and can be done in Arduino
- Software: thermal/gliding assist software that help in gliding, few commercial solutions around but they rely on deterministic algos, so they don’t pick solutions from historical weather/task logs databases or live information from other gliders traffic (you do get this live), this mainly software
- Science: what I have in mind is not very interesting for flying
