In September 2025, I was accepted into Penn Jet Propulsion, a division of the Penn Aerospace Club. I am part of the Research and Development team, where we are designing and constructing a retrofit electromechanical afterburner system for a JetCat engine. My role to date has been to research, generate design concepts in SolidWorks, and complete Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of the design using ANSYS. I was also invited by the professor of my Thermal-Fluids Engineering class to present my findings to our class after consulting with him on some questions.
CAD Design Concepts - The views above show a preliminary afterburner design that I developed. The circular spray bars featured in this design, specifically rendered on the left, were briefly considered due to their manufacturability and circular symmetry, which offered even fuel distribution. However, they were abandoned due to projected difficulties in assembly, as well as significant flow obstruction.
CFD simulations on preliminary geometry.
CFD simulations used to analyze flameholder geometry.
Presenting my design and CFD simulations to the Thermal-Fluids Engineering class in November 2025 to show correlation with class material.