Projects

In a densely populated country like Bangladesh search and rescue operations after a disaster of large scale becomes really difficult and tedious because of the presence of inaccessible spots in the disaster site and unavailability of modern equipment. In the past it has been seen that completion of a rescue operation after the collapse of a building took numerous days mostly because of blind spots at the site and searching for survivors all over the place instead of being able to pinpoint the exact locations.

This project focused on a search and rescue drone equipped with a camera having video recording function and capable of both panning and tilting when needed to give a 360° view of the disaster site to identify the potential locations which may be focused first to increase the chances of finding more survivors. The drone can fly for about 15-16 minutes once charged fully while sending photos and videos to a receiver having a display on the ground using a transmitter. It can be controlled remotely within a range of about 1.7 Km which would allow visual access to a large portion of area under concern. An initial hover over the site would reduce the time of the operation greatly by showing spots which otherwise would remain unnoticed. Moreover, the drone can be dispatched during or after natural disasters like flood, cyclone, tornado, earthquake for surveillance of the affected area.

The drone was designed keeping in mind the necessary theories and governing principles relevant to optimization of center of gravity for agile maneuvering and also efficient usage of raw materials based on stress analysis. This model is planned to be brought into reality using additive manufacturing or 3-D printing once necessary fund is managed.

Aircraft engines are highly sophisticated and ensuring its optimum operating condition is an integral part of aviation safety. Due to continuous operation, the engine fan blades may develop microscopic fatigue cracks which continuously grow with time and at one point result to failure of the blades. On April 17, 2018, a Boeing 737 experienced a near catastrophic event when an engine blade of the CFM56-7B broke off mid-air and damaged the engine cowl and the engine itself. Another recent event involves a Boeing 777 which also experienced similar situation due to an engine fan blade failure. Both these events have a common cause and that is undetected fatigue crack propagation in fan blade.

This project aims to design a ‘ready to manufacture’ CAD model of an aircraft engine fan and carry out vibrational analysis on the design using ANSYS software to observe the change in natural frequency of blades with and without cracks. We hope to fabricate a model of fan blade soon to carry out experimental analysis and validate the idea by comparing the simulation results.

This project can play an important role in early detection of fatigue cracks in aircraft fan blades and prevent similar events from happening in the future. The current method of crack detection by visual inspection using ultraviolet rays can be replaced by this vibrational analysis if results of this project are favorable.