For this project, I completed a full whitepaper design of a single seat turbojet aircraft. As part of the design study, I built the majority of the aluminum aircraft fuselage structure and cockpit to dial in airframe mass properties and structure design. The main point of the project was to test out and learn legacy aluminum fabrication methods.
This was a whitepaper design that I did for a small general aviation turbojet in the 175 lb thrust range. I designed this engine concurrently with the Askance Asymmetric Single Seat Jet.
The goal of this project was to design and build an all-mechanical camera mount that would passively rotate at the same angular speed that the earth rotates to facilitate taking consecutive astrophotography images with minimal blur. When the tracker rotational axis was properly aligned with the North Star, I was able to take low-noise long-exposure images one-after-another for 7-8 hours. I then “stacked” the images to get a final image with an equivalent exposure time of many hours.
I designed this gimbal head specifically to support a large 600mm f4.0 telephoto lens.
For this project, I completed a full whitepaper design of a single seat turbojet aircraft. As part of the design study, I built the majority of the carbon fiber aircraft fuselage structure and cockpit to dial in airframe mass properties and structure design. The main point of the project was to test out and learn new composite fabrication and mold making methods.
I designed, built, and tested this with the goal of evaluating the feasibility of a small general aviation turbojet. The project was a great success with several static test runs validating the engine performance and design requirement. I designed this engine concurrently with the JA103 Single Seat Jet Composite Airframe.
This was a short duration design/build/test project that I did to evaluate a confined combustion reaction control thruster idea that I had been thinking about for a few years. I designed the thruster for single discharge combustion using a burst disk and pre-charged fuel oxidizer in the chamber. I triggered ignition using a custom high current bridge-wire igniter. I fired the thruster dozens of times using a matrix of different fuels. I tested the thruster in a vacuum chamber with different ambient pressure to evaluate nozzle geometry under different conditions.
I designed and built this Hall-effect thruster to test the feasibility of a very simple micro electric thruster. I fueled the thruster with Argon using a long capillary tube as a flow regulator. The thruster was a compact design using a radial array of stacked rare earth magnets and a remote high voltage laser power supply. I balanced the system electric potential by making an electron emitting cathode from a heated tungsten wire in a ceramic guide tube. I tested the thruster for a total of several hours of run time in a custom vacuum chamber that I fabricated for thruster testing.
This was a short duration design/build/test project that I did to evaluate an improved version of my previous Deflagration Thruster project. For this project, I fabricated a new thruster assembly, but schematically, I replaced the burst disk assembly in the Deflagration Thruster with an automatically resetting mechanical popped valve that allowed the thruster to fire in quick succession and even automatically fire at a set frequency. I triggered ignition using a custom high voltage igniter. I fired the thruster dozens of times using a matrix of different fuels. I tested the thruster in a vacuum chamber with different ambient pressure to evaluate nozzle geometry under different conditions.
Michael Fuchs Personal Projects 