MORGANTOWN -- For the twelfth time in 13 years, a team from West Virginia University will be participating in NASA’s Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program, scheduled for July 12-20, at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The team is made up of students from the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, including one girl from Madison.
Samantha Dolin, of Madison, is a sophomore in mechanical engineering at WVU.
She graduated from Scott High School in 2011 7th in my class with a G.P.A. of 4.33.
He paretns are Kenneth P. and Donna Dolin and she has two sisters, Katie Dolin and Leanne Lares.
“I'm an executive officer in WVU's section of Society of Women Engineers, which is the biggest engineering society on campus,” Dolin said. “I've been on the Dean’s list. I've tutored with the disability services, engineering learning center and personal tutoring. I'm currently a Teaching Assistant for the Principles of Engineering 1 course. I really enjoy teaching that class.
I'm pretty sure I'm the only person from Boone County to be involved with NASA. And I will be the first person from Boone County to be onboard the Zero Gravity Aircraft that they train the astronauts on. I'm the Foundation Scholar of the WVU Boone Co Alumni.”
The team at WVU that Dolin is part of is one of 14 teams selected nationally and will join student teams from Purdue University, Rice University, University of Arizona, Virginia Tech, MIT, Yale and more.
WVU’s project, “Optimization of Liquid Spray Cooling in a Variable Gravity Environment,” will determine whether or not the onset of microgravity conditions causes a significant change in the heat removal performance of spray cooling.
“On earth, spray cooling has been shown to produce the largest amount of heat removal, or cooling, per unit of surface area of just about any other cooling method,” explained John Kuhlman, team advisor and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. “It also results in a relatively uniform surface temperature of the object to be cooled. This ability makes spray cooling attractive for cooling small, high-power electrical components.”
The experiment will involve spraying a hot surface with a fine shower of water droplets, and observing the cooling behavior.
"After data analysis is performed on the results we'll obtain from the experiment in microgravity, we will then compare results with those obtained from the ground experiments. This will allow us to determine the role spray cooling plays,” Dolin said. “If all goes well we have a patent on our hands. Which makes me extremely excited, how many people can say they have a patent when they're 19 years old?"
While the team hopes its research will determine whether or not the onset of microgravity conditions cause a significant change in the heat removal performances of spray cooling, previous studies have produced conflicting results. If their research proves true, the team believes spray cooling will be a candidate for the cooling of high-power electronics aboard future spacecraft.
Flight Week provides students with the opportunity to get hands-on experience to conduct their research. The students will experience weightlessness when they test their experiment onboard the “Weightless Wonder.” The aircraft flies extreme parabolic maneuvers over the Gulf of Mexico, simulating hyper-gravity and microgravity from two times the force on earth to what someone would feel walking on the moon and floating in space.
Joining Itschner on the team are senior mechanical and aerospace engineering majors Spencer Elyard (Clarksburg), Evan Ford (Follansbee), Dustin Frohnapfel (Follansbee) and Joseph West (Wheeling); juniors Jacob Cordonier (Parkersburg), who majors in mechanical engineering, Michael Powell (Hagerstown, Md.) and Dinie Rosli (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Nicholas Underwood (Beckley), aerospace engineering; and sophomores Samantha Dolin (Madison), mechanical engineering, and Steven Kosko (Poland, Ohio), mechanical and aerospace engineering.