A team of scientists, including a Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ researcher, is working to help NASA design a rotorcraft to explore Saturn’s moon, Titan. The mission and lander are called Dragonfly and are planned to launch in 2027 and reach Titan by the mid-2030s.

Michael Kinzel, an assistant professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s , is working with NASA as part of the Dragonfly mission. The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is managing the mission for NASA and will build and operate the rotorcraft-lander. Kinzel’s team is supporting the aerodynamic design of the rotorcraft’s fuselage.

With low gravity and an atmosphere that’s thicker than Earth’s, Titan is better suited to a flying vehicle than a wheeled surface rover like those that have been used to explore Mars.

Kinzel’s group is using advanced computer simulations of the gas flow Dragonfly will experience as it flies on Titan, which will help inform how the vehicle is designed. The simulations are useful for ensuring the flight distance from one landing site to the next is maximized, as well as to understand flight scenarios that will be encountered on Titan.

“These computer models are high-fidelity simulations that are between design and experimental testing,” Kinzel says. “Our research is important because it helps the team understand Dragonfly flight in the context of real Titan conditions, which is hard to test experimentally. It reduces costs and increases the likelihood of success.”

Kinzel is an expert in aerodynamics and computational modeling of fluid flows, and has a background in supporting designs for helicopters, submarines and torpedoes for defense research.

The mission’s principal investigator is Elizabeth Turtle, a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins APL.

As principal investigator, she is responsible for making sure that the Dragonfly mission achieves its science goals — exploring Titan to understand its environment and the organic chemistry that has occurred there — as well as keeping the project budget and schedule on track.

Titan has similar chemicals to what scientists think Earth was like before life began. As a result, Dragonfly’s mission is to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment, to investigate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed, and even to search for chemical signatures that could be indicative of water-based or hydrocarbon-based life – as well as to see how effective a multirotor aircraft is in planetary exploration.

“We don’t know how chemistry took the leap to biology on Earth, but we do know that Titan has had all of the ingredients necessary for life, at least life as we know it,” Turtle says.

“Mike’s team has been modeling the interaction of the Dragonfly rotorcraft with the atmosphere,” she says. “His models reveal how much atmospheric drag the rotorcraft will experience during flights and will help with streamlining the design to make it more aerodynamic for efficient aerial exploration of Titan.”

Kinzel received his doctorate in aerospace engineering from Pennsylvania State University and joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering, a part of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s College of Engineering and Computer Science, in 2018. He is also a member of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s .

The team is doing this through a recently awarded National Science Foundation Rapid Response Research Award for $200,000 to explore reducing COVID-19 transmission by making saliva heavier and stickier using candy or corn starch to help sneeze and cough particles fall rather than float.

The approach could lead to creating something as simple as a cough drop or lozenge that people would pop in their mouths before going into the grocery store, work or school.

“One way to kind of think about it is, for example, clouds are just little, tiny droplets that are suspended in the air for hours, and they just flow with the atmosphere,” says Mike Kinzel, an assistant professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering who is the project’s principal investigator.

“However, these droplets collide to form larger droplets that just fall out of the air,” he says. “That’s kind of the process we’re trying to promote. We don’t want the droplets to blow around with the wind like a cloud, we want them to fall out of the sky like rain.”

A way to reduce transmission distance will be especially important as people return to work and school, where maintaining six feet of social distance may be difficult, says Kareem Ahmed, an assistant professor in the department and co-principal investigator.

“The six feet is great as a general guide, but then in a confined environment like our offices, grocery stores, public transit or hospitals, these droplets are going to interact with surfaces, HVAC systems or ventilations,” Ahmed says.

“So if we change the properties from the source, which is essentially our respiratory functions, whether it’s coughing, sneezing, speaking or breathing, then you’re simply going to reduce the amount that you’re producing, and hopefully bring the six feet to something shorter, where we can interact more,” Ahmed says.

“Based on our early data, coupling a face mask with saliva mixed with corn starch will potentially have us go from six feet to two feet for social distancing,” he says.

Leading the analyses of the effort are postdoctoral researchers Douglas Hector Fontes in Kinzel’s lab and Jonathan Reyes in Ahmed’s lab.

Fontes is running numerical simulations to study how differences in viscosity, density and surface tension impact droplet dispersal.

“Our preliminary results have shown a significant reduction in the duration of droplet suspension in the air by changing the properties of the saliva,” Fontes says.

Reyes is using high-speed cameras to characterize the patterns and distance traveled of droplets emitted from sneezing and coughing, including those that have been altered by candy or starch. He’s finding similar reductions.

“Our data have shown that altering the physical properties of the saliva shows great promise in reducing the exposure of a sneeze,” Reyes says. “Particulates travel shorter distances and fall faster.”

As part of the research, Reyes is also supplying the sneezing.

“If you know anyone who can sneeze on command, send them my way,” Reyes says.

The team is working closely with Jelena Catania, a doctor and expert in infectious diseases at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s College of Medicine and the Orlando Veteran’s Administration Medical Center, for the implementation challenges, and Brent Craven, a researcher at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for the potential implementation.

Kinzel received his doctorate in aerospace engineering from The Pennsylvania State University and joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ in 2018. In addition to being a member of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering, a part of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s College of Engineering and Computer Science, he also works with Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research.

Ahmed earned his doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He worked at Pratt & Whitney Military Engines and Old Dominion University prior to joining Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2015. He is the director of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Propulsion and Energy Research Laboratory, a faculty member of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research, an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a U.S. Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellow, and a member of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Renewable Energy and Chemical Transformation Cluster.

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