March/April Update -- Pre-Project -- May 1st, 2023

Since our meeting with Mr. Charnas, progress has slowed down a little bit. Our main breakthrough has been the discovery of a paper released by a group of seniors a few years ago at WPI. The paper basically detailed their senior project building a miniature turbojet engine which is very similar to our plan. We’ve reached out to several people regarding this project and just recently got a reply from the project advisor who now works in the aerospace industry. Our welding skills have also improved tremendously, and we’ve finished several smaller projects for fun. Additionally, we’ve found a contact who has access to some scrap sheet metal and is willing to give us some for our project. Aside from that we’ve also utilized a few airfoil design programs and have successfully designed one axial compressor stage. All the literature we’ve read about miniature turbojets suggests using a radial compressor, so we may switch to that design later. We still have to source our other materials that aren’t sheet metal and design the full engine. The next step is to finalize the designs and begin 3D printing pieces. This post keeps getting automatically flagged by Blogger as violating community guidelines so it may be intermittently available...

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