Will MacCormack - Aerospace Engineer on WillMac.xyz

EMAE 356: Aerospace Design

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 08:32:38 -0400

My group’s senior Aerospace Design mission is a 1200 passegenger “megajet” capable of ten thousand nautical miles of range, takeoff and landing on a ten thousand foot runway, cruising at mach 0.8, and a service ceiling of 40,000 ft.

Plane Level Analysis

The first step in plane design is locking down a set of weight, wingspan, and aspect ratio that can successfully meet the mission requirements with a similar engine efficiency, drag coefficient, and empty to full weight ratio to comparable planes. The typical (professor recommended) approach is throwing as many human hours at a spreadsheet to build intuition and guess & check your way to a valid configuration. My Python script leverages Dask for multi-core, vectorized computation of millions of configurations per second, filters out configurations that miss the requirements with Pandas, and plots the footprint of available configurations for easy interpretation with a Seaborn PairPlot.

EMAE 355: Design of Fluid & Thermal Elements

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:47:28 -0400

This class focused on three group design projects of Fluid and Thermal Systems ranging from traditional power cycles to thermoelectric generation. On each project I used my Python numerical methods skills to enable efficient analysis and optimization of the design.

If you want to see the equations behind the any of the projects, click on the section heading to view a PDF of the project report.

Project 1:

Supply appropriately conditioned CO2 to a bearing jacket to ensure smooth power cycle operation.

Fused Kalman Filter

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:47:28 -0400

My final project in Bayesian Scientific Computing was designing a Kalman Filter Architecture flexible enough to be applied to anything from a car (my design team) to a rocket (my group mate’s design team). The result is a Python library that allows for modular combinations of Linear, Extended, and Unscented Kalman Filter Predictors and Correctors while handling sensor dropout and variable update rates.

Take a look at the poster

Or the full report