Momentum - September 2019 - 3

BRIEFS
ORIGAMI INSPIRES U WASHINGTON
RESEARCHERS

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY
TOPS IN ROCKETS

Space vehicles like SpaceX's
Photo credit: Kiyomi Taguchi/
University of Washington
Falcon 9 are designed to be
reusable. But this means that,
like Olympic gymnasts hoping
for a gold medal, they have to
stick their landings. Landing
is stressful on a rocket's legs
because they must handle
Inspired by the paper
the force from the impact
folding art of origami, a
with the landing pad. One
University of Washington
way to combat this is to build team created a paper model
legs out of materials that
of a metamaterial that uses
absorb some of the force and "folding creases" to soften
soften the blow. University of
impact forces for potential
Washington researchers have applications in items such as
spacecraft and cars.
developed a novel solution
to help reduce impact forces.
Potential applications include spacecraft and cars.
Inspired by the paper folding art of origami, the team
created a paper model of a metamaterial that uses
"folding creases" to soften impact forces and promote
forces that relax stresses in the chain.

NASA has announced the winners of the
2019 NASA Student Launch competition,
with the Vanderbilt Aerospace Design
Lab from Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, Tennessee, claiming top
honors in the college/university division.
It is the team's fifth win in the last six
years. This year's challenge, the 19th,
was hosted by NASA's Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The
competition's charge for student teams
was to propose, design, build, and test
a reusable rocket with a payload. The
rocket had to reach a team-selected
The Vanderbilt University rocket
altitude between 4,000 and 5,500 feet. team's entry, ARES, takes off at the
Once reaching its highest point, the
NASA Student Launch competition.
rocket deployed a recovery system and
landed safely. The payload had to be a drone or rover that autonomously
deployed from the rocket after the rocket landed. NASA engineers
face similar questions as they design the Space Launch System rocket
to send astronauts and payloads to the Moon. The University of North
Carolina-Charlotte from Charlotte, NC, finished second, followed by the
University of Akron, Ohio. Fourty-five teams competed in the April 6
event following an eight-month design period.

POLYTECHNIQUE MONTREAL TOPS
SOLAR CAR FIELD
Photo credit: Esteban Project

Estaban Project team members pose with their winning car.
Piloting its prototype solar car, Esteban 9, a Polytechnique
Montreal student technical society team, won the SingleOccupant Vehicle Class at the 2019 Formula Sun Grand
Prix competition in the U.S. on the American Solar
Challenge closed course for the second year running, also
setting a record and taking home the Teamwork Award.
The car completed 230 laps of the Circuit of The Americas
racetrack in Austin, Texas, over three days, covering a
total cumulative distance of 788 miles. The Polytechnique
technical society finished ahead of a team from Principia
College in Illinois, with 195 laps completed, and another
from the University of Kentucky, with 153 laps completed.
Ten teams out of the twelve originally registered took
part in the Single-Occupant Vehicle Class. With this
performance, the Esteban Project also set a new Formula
Sun Grand Prix course record for total laps on the Circuit
of The Americas track, surpassing the old record of 228.

MOMENTUM

Photo credit: NASA/Fred Deaton

UNIVERSITY MICHIGAN TEAM STUDIES URBAN
AIR MOBILITY
According to a new study
published in Nature
Communications, electric
vertical takeoff and landing
(eVTOL) urban air mobility
(UAM) vehicles - commonly
referred to as "flying
cars" - are better suited to
longer flights than shorter
Image credit: Dave Brenner/
University of Michigan School for
commutes. The study, "Role
Environment and Sustainability
of flying cars in sustainable
Artist's
rendering
of
an
electric vertical takeoff
mobility," was authored
and
landing
(eVTOL)
urban
air mobility (UAM)
by engineers from the
vehicle-or "air taxi"-flying above an urban
University of Michigan's
center.
Center for Sustainable
Systems (CSS) and from the
Ford Motor Company's Research and Advanced Engineering team and is
the first comprehensive sustainability assessment of UAM. The authors
determined that deploying UAM systems in geographically constrained
and congested urban areas would be beneficial, especially as part of
a ride-share service, saying fully booked UAM vehicles would be more
effective than ground vehicles in transporting passengers "from San
Francisco to San Jose or from Detroit to Cleveland."

September 2019 3

https://www.spacex.com/falcon9 https://www.spacex.com/falcon9 https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/studentlaunch/home/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/home/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/home/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/index.html https://www.umich.edu/ http://css.umich.edu/ http://css.umich.edu/ https://corporate.ford.com/homepage.html

Momentum - September 2019

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