Aeroneering?
Posted 20 Feb 2013.
This is an experiment in using Jekyll and GitHub pages to organize my ongoing thoughts on aerospace engineering.
Without really trying to, I’ve ended up spending a lot of my idle brain time thinking about how aircraft fly and how they might fly better, differently, or more efficiently. I’ve also been thinking about areas where a computer scientist that knows a little bit about aerospace engineering might be able to do some interesting, if not useful work in this space.
I thought this was all idle brain activity until I read about Project AHLLE which seeks to explore the concepts of wing morphing and other interesting approaches at achieving high lift and low drag in certain situations. I had been thinking just days prior about modern material design and the possibility of dropping the leading edge of a wing very similar to their study. After this and a couple of other similar events, I realized I at least had my finger on the pulse of modern aerospace engineering, so I decided that it was time to think a little harder.
I know a little bit about flying airplanes and I know a little bit about why they fly, but I felt like a little more background information was in order. An initial WikiDive starting at the Airfoil page was quite interesting (that’s a whole separate post though). I eventually landed on TU Delft’s Introduction to Aerospace Engineering course. It is available on iTunes U and via the web as an OpenCourseware course. I’ve been watching and listening to the course while cleaning and doing dishes and stuff like that. I hope to get over to the KU engineering library to borrow a copy of Introduction to Flight by John Anderson. It is supposed to be a solid but accessible introduction.
I decided to organize my thoughts with Jekyll and since I hope soon to mix words and code, putting it all up on GitHub and releasing everything as BSD as I go seemed to make sense.