Aerospace Engineering

Adheesh Piramal
He is a 12th grade student who is interested to work on an Aerospace Engineering research program.

Adheesh has won over 40 state and regional academic awards, as well as the AP Scholar Award with distinction, and the Cambridge Learner ‘Top of the World’ award for his environmental management work. He has also taken on summer courses and independent studies related to remote sensing and aerospace engineering.

Learning objectives

• The first few weeks were focused on learning MATLAB and programming, with the goal of helping student become comfortable with the application, language syntax, simulation coding, and plotting results.
• After this, the focus shifted to orbital mechanics, where student explored how orbital motion is derived from Newton’s Law of Gravitation, covering both n-body and restricted 2-body problems. He learned that natural orbits are mathematically represented by conic sections and that angular momentum and energy are conserved.
• Student then wrote MATLAB code to compute orbital parameters and plot the orbit paths for each type of conic section.
• For student’s final assignment, he created MATLAB code to calculate burns for a Hohmann Transfer. As a culmination of the program, he wrote a comprehensive project report detailing his objectives, the physics and parameters of orbital motion, and the results of his simulations.

What challenges did he face?

• Adheesh did not have background with programming, so learning Matlab was the most difficult part of the program. Even with Calculus background,  there was difficulty following some of the orbit parameter derivations due to unfamiliarity in vector math and notation.

How did our program help him?

• Adheesh learnt MATLAB and programming. The goal was for him to become comfortable with the application, language syntax, simulation coding, and plotting results.
• Adheesh concluded the mentorship program with a report in Keplerian Orbits and Orbit Transfers, summarizing what he learned and results obtained with his Matlab software.

Matched Professor

The mentor is the Department Head of Aerospace & Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech. She is a past chair of the AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Committee, an AIAA Fellow, a licensed private pilot, and a certified Part 107 UAS pilot.