Here's the deal

Um, I'm in a super weird place in life right. I've got four kids. I'm an engineer. I've got this YouTube thing

I give talks, but my channel name is Smarter Every Day

I've been wanting to go back and get a PhD for years, but it's never felt right.

It feels right now. I met a guy; his name is Dr. Kavan Hazeli. We click, we're on the same wavelength

I'm going to get a PhD and there's more to it than that.

Dr. Hazeli applied for a National Science Foundation grant. Over a five-year period, he's got a million bucks

And he's asked me if I'd come work with him as a part of my PhD I could help work with

transfer students for research, and the research is incredible. Like that's the thing about the University of Alabama in Huntsville, right?

This is a school located right next to Marshall Space Flight Center. You got all these army organizations nearby. There is a ton of

Research that happens at UAH so here's the deal. In this video

I'm going to show you three research programs that are actively looking for

undergraduate transfer students. Topic number one

3D lattice structures printed by NASA. We're testing the strength. Check out. Dr. Hazeli's lab.

I'm about to film Dr.Hazeli when he doesn't expect it

Dr. Hazeli Hey

Okay, so so this is doctor Hazeli and he's in charge of the lab here

It's... what what do we call this? It's the

so what we do here basically, we are we are learning about material behavior, so we try to understand

how materials reacts with different environments could be impacts could be loading could be just cycling the materials and

The entire idea is learned from the material behavior and in for manufacturing

so Dr. Hazeli showed me this and he's like "are you interested in getting a PhD," and I said

Yes

Because what do you call this so we call them lattices structures. Basically we

remove the mass from materials by carefully printing them out so the idea behind them is make the matter as light yet strong

Enough to withstand a lot of pressure and lots of different environments

So we have this set of the topology which was given to us by NASA

Our ultimate goal is to optimize the topology

Which one is strongest?

For quasi-static compression test Octet Truss is the strongest one

What what about for impact, is it different?

We haven't tried here, so we wanted to do it today maybe

Is it possible that impact is different and quasi static

yes, possible why?

Because the mechanisms by which material deform at highest strain rate is different than quasi-static

Okay, Andrew is about to do this first shot and it's a dodecahedron, right?

Yes, right

Dodecahedron. So the way this works is there's this large piston over there?

He pressurizes the piston, slams it into this long rod

This rod is going to impact the sample right there

So you can get the input and output energy of this impact and you can see how much energy that particular sample absorbed

Three-two-one

Three-two-one

So it got squished

Is it like, perfectly flat?

Yes Let me see

Wait nuh-uh

And it's hot! It's hot?

Yeah, you cannot dissipate a lot of heat when deformation is very fast so that amount of pressure

stored in the material. This was very hot

So it's hot right now? Yeah Can I feel it? Oh, it sure is

It sure is so that was dodecahedron right What are you going to do next?

So the next is a rhombic dodecahedron

sweet? Let's do it. This is a big deal like everybody knows you can 3D print metals

But this problem is very difficult. For example stress equals force divided by area, but what is the cross-sectional area?

Do you treat it like a bolt material? Do you measure the cross-section of each individual leg on the topology?

What is the angle, how does it matter blah blah blah, there's a ton of stuff

We're measuring the overall strain of the material. We're acquitting that to a stress

This is the future of metal. Like we are figuring out how to work as humans with 3D printed

structures and is fantastic. So that's one option for research. Another one is Dr. Gabe Xu who's working at the plasma

Electrodynamic research lab. This is incredible stuff. Okay, so Dr. Xu is... just.. I mean I like walk in the room and

He's showing me an ion thruster. That's how it rolls here.

The planned use is eventually, we want to develop it for small satellites, Cube sets

1U, maybe not 1U, say 3U or 9U Cube Sats

A lot of them have orbit maneuvering capabilities

So what kind of ISP, would you see from something like this? I mean I've played a little bit of Kerbal Space Program

[laughs] For very small ones like these, ISP, you may be looking at it. I'll say like a thousand seconds

Whoa

Those are startup transients Startup transients?

Are you not entertained?! I walk in and the man's firing an ion thruster

And he's like, "oh whatever, just startup transient. It's not a big deal." What?! What's hap-

Dr. Xu just made it work like MacGyver, only ion propulsion. Is that pretty much what happened?

like MacGyver? [scoff] MacGyver you know

oh come on just embrace it

[laughs] So there is a electromag.. electromagnet wrapped around

the thruster, which, without it turned on [...?...]

Generate a magnetic field inside to trap the electrons to reduce the electron currents of the anode basically

So we're trying to control the amount of current that the anode is seeing

really? So is, is thrust directly proportional with current?

thrust is propor... [waves hands] kind of

It's is proportional to the acceleration voltage, and how many ions come out which you can sort of say is current?

Aaand it just died [Laughs]

So to be clear dr. Xu is interested in getting research assistants at the undergrad level

Which would be what these students are doing here, so they can basically come work with you and develop ion propulsion

yeah, we've got different propulsion plasma projects

That's awesome

I know right? Is that awesome or what? Okay, the last lab. I've actually featured this on Smarter Every Day in the past

It's called the atom lab. They are researching

How butterfly wings work and they're doing it with these really

cool cameras that can calculate the position of a butterfly wing just by putting a reflector on his wing when he flies.

okay, I'm in the atom lab with Dr. Kang and you get to do some pretty cool stuff with butterflies, right?

mm hmm What do you do?

so we are interested in butterfly flights or in particular, the monarch butterflies

Because they are known for their migration distance, which is the longest among insects.

no one really understands how they are able to make that distance which can be as long as

4,000 kilometers, so we are trying to understand their aerodynamic

mechanisms and to apply that to develop bio-inspired micro air vehicles

these cameras emit infrared rays which will reflect off of these markers and we can treat those markers

When we have a bunch of cameras, we can triangulate those markers to one position in space

You can study the motion or the kinematics of the butterfly and the way it flaps so this is the CFD

Simulation and here we are seeing the work the [?] activities that the wing is producing will interact

The fluid around it so is that is that a vortex that you're showing us? That is, that is a vortex. those are three-dimensional shapes of the vortex around the wing.

So you're modeling vortex shedding yes using computational fluid dynamics exactly and retro-reflective

imagery from actual yes biological specimens yes, yes, that's where we are going, towards that, yeah

And the whole point is to make a micro air vehicle or at least study the efficiency of

The butterfly so that we can understand how to apply that toward of micro air vehicle The possibility of actually using it to do, cool things

That's rad! This flapper is hooked up to a force transducer at the bottom and

this measures the force produced by the flapper and we can see the forces in our

software which is directly connected to the force transducer

[Mechanical flapping noises]

So lets do a... I don't know why that's so exciting but it

It reminds me of those birds. You remember the old birds that you could wind up and throw? yeah, and then they fly, yeah

You're trying to figure out by flapping

modes how a butterfly steers

I'm trying to get the communication between

The flapper and our transmitters She's trying to develop our remote controller so that she can

control something like this are you doing this? Yes This looks like electrical engineering

[laughs] A Little bit Really? So, that's awesome!

What year are you I'm a junior Really? Are you gonna be a grad student?

I am going to grad school, yes.

So the whole, the whole point of this whole program Dr. Hazeli is

Undergrads can come in and they can work with you on the matrix stuff the squishing

Structure, designing the light structure material, for impact situation And it's that's probably what I'm working on Exactly

Yeah, and so and then there's also the ion propulsion and plasma. That's true and also we have the project about

supersonic wind tunnel with the Prof. Ligrani

and you have already discussed about Dr. Xu now and also here in the atom lab

Students come to the program. They have opportunity to interact with the more senior students and also the professors or to get some hands-on experience

About the active research which is important for education and the government

This is a big deal, so if you want to check this out

You can go to -- you made a website, didn't you? We did.

matrix.uah.edu matrix.uah.edu yes that's right

you can check it out, work with me work with Dr. Hazeli, work with butterfly wings

big deal! I'm excited about this so go to the website matrix.uah.edu

and apply and and who is it for? It's for transfer students? for transfer students basically

They get to pay for their education through the NSF money we have, and in return

They need to improve their GPA and be involved with the research

So it's not for free. You actually have to work hard and do a good job

Well, they don't have to but if they need to stay in the program... [laughs] so yeah you gotta work harder

So is that what you're thinking, Dr. Kang? Yeah, okay, cool anyway matrix.uah.edu. That's an NSF grant

That doctor Hazeli is leading up, and I'm working on so go check it out. Thanks

bye