An electrically driven propellant pump (HALE E-Pump) was analysed and tested to determine its viability for use in a bi-propellant launch vehicle for the High-Altitude Liquid Engine (HALE) student rocket team at Oregon State University (OSU). The pump, manufactured in 2022 by students in OSU machine shops, was hydrostatically tested...
Real transportation fuels contain a wide range of hydrocarbon species, and this complexity poses challenges for modeling. Surrogates with a simpler blend of hydrocarbon reference fuels can approximate the physical and chemical characteristics of real fuels and enable practical simulation of the reacting flows that occur in engines and combustors....
Accurately modeling the chemistry of conventional and alternative liquid transportation fuels in combustion technology is vital to predicting important quantities such as the burning rate, heat release, and pollutant emissions. However, incorporating detailed chemical kinetic models into reactive-flow simulations poses a significant challenge due to the associated high computational expense...
The aerospace industry uses chemical kinetic models when designing propulsion systems to acquire specific details about the rate of chemical reactions, heat release, and combustion stability. These models, however, are too large and stiff to be useful as they can take weeks to run computations on. The pyMARS python package...
The High Altitude Liquid Engine (HALE) team is developing of a 2000 lbf thrust liquid propellant engine for a flight vehicle capable of breaching the Karman Line (100 km in altitude). As part the development of this flight vehicle, this research focuses on the design and characterization of a novel...
Student parents are a growing population within college and university campuses. Though their numbers continue to grow, there is no proportionate growth in resources from the universities that are available to them. Issues like this and others that student parents face due to their unique identity were amplified in the...
Optical trapping is a tool used throughout a wide variety of disciplines rang- ing from precisely probing and manipulating sub-micron organisms in biol- ogy to analyzing fundamental charge transfer in colloidal physics. This thesis presents research involving optical tweezer force measurements of polystyrene and silica microspheres. In addition, preliminary work...
This item is a powerpoint presentation of an HHMI research project conducted during the summer of 2011 by Kyle Ireton, in partnership with Dr. Fredrick Stormshak. The objective of this study was to identify whether the myristoylated alanine-rich c kinase substrate (MARCKS) protein is phosphorylated in vivo, in response to...
Ceratonova shasta is a myxozoan fish parasite that impacts hatchery and wild populations of salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest. Levels of the parasite in river water can be effectively monitored through direct filtration of parasite spores from water, extraction of total "environmental DNA" (eDNA), then quantitative polymerase chain...
The steroid hormone estrogen plays a crucial role in regulating certain mammalian tissues, especially female reproductive systems. Estrogen effects physiological changes in the cell by altering transcription activity for certain target genes, as a consequence of interactions between estradiol-17β (E2) and its nuclear receptor (nER). This mechanism of cellular control...