These are a few of my favorite projects, both personal and professional. This picture was taken at 90,000ft with a near space balloon.
Near Space UAS (60k feet)
This is one of my favorite projects I have ever helped with. Growing up I was always experimenting with fixed wing and multirotor UAs systems and in this project I took a UAS to 60,000ft and flew it both remotely and autonomously back to the launch site.
Magnetorehological Fluid Damper
While working towards a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering at WSU, I had the pleasure of developing a new magnetorheological fluid(MRF) based brake. MRF is a type of smart material whose viscosity is variable in the presence of a magnetic field. This unique property can be leveraged to create continuously controllable braking, typically achieved using coils to generate a magnetic field and a rotor suspended in the MRF. When a magnetic field is applied to the MRF, the viscosity increases, making the rotor difficult to rotate. When the field is removed, the viscosity decreases allowing the rotor to spin freely.
In most designs, output torque is increased by increasing power to the coils to generate a stronger magnetic field. The goal of my research was to develop a low-power, continuously controllable brake using only permanent magnets. As expected, the most difficult element of this research was to devise a method of “turning off” a permanent magnet so the fluid could be deactivated. Our solution was to reroute the flux away from the fluid using an array of permeant magnets. The flux direction was controlled using a small servomotor connected to the permanent magnets.
Through the development process I used 2D/3D CAD/FEA for the mechanical design, and then FEA to optimize the magnetic flux path. The FEA data was imported to MATLAB where the estimated torque could be calculated. When a suitable design was reached, a prototype was machined in-house and verified to function.
Hydraulically Driven Automotive Air Conditioning System
While working at BraunNW a need arose for a high capacity HVAC cooling system for a large prisoner transport vehicle. I was approached to design the bracketry, belt drive, and help with the hydraulic system.
Industrial Paint Booth Controls
While working at BraunNW our 20yo industrial paint booths were regularly breaking down and the controls were highly unreliable. Rather than purchasing new booths costing millions of dollars we rebuilt our old ones with custom controls. At the beginning of this project I knew the theory of controls and PLC based automation but had no experience. By the end I was able to produce a highly effective system that has proven to be more reliable and user friendly.
Blake Wiley 