October 2022 - Written by Udaymaan Sidhu

Research Paper

During the summer of 2022, I partnered with Polygence to conduct research, with assistance from a mentor, on a topic of my choice about Hypersonic Aircraft design. My mentor, Tanay Topac, is a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering and helped me refine my research topic to be about a 50-passenger hypersonic for a Mach 5 flight. The research involved using simulation software to evaluate the changes in different design variables on important aerodynamic performance metrics. The data I collected was then used to establish a relationship between the variables and metrics, which were then run through an optimization program (in Python) to find the best values for the variables studied. This research project gave me a vast amount of knowledge of aerospace engineering principles as applied in the real world and helped me learn more about pursuing my passion for hypersonic aircraft design. An added benefit to this research project was that it gave me insight into conducting and writing a research paper for an engineering problem. I also learned coding in Python. I believe the opportunities that I pursued over the summer have substantially prepared me to pursue my selected major, which is aerospace engineering. This paper is published in the Journal of High School Science.