Teaching – AMSL@UA

Current Courses

AEM 491/591: Spacecraft Structures
- Course Description: Spacecraft configuration, structural design, and engineering procedures from design to verification. Structural concepts and design methods used in stiffened panels, space frames, frames with different repeating units, sandwich plates, cable and membrane structures, iso grid, tensegrity, deployable, and adaptive structures.
- Outline of Topics:
  - Introduction: Spacecraft structural elements, load transfer mechanisms, materials
  - Structural Instability: Buckling of thin plates, local instability, instability of stiffened panels, failure of stiffened panels, crippling strength of sheet-stiffener panels
  - Stress analysis and design: Strength and design of round, streamlined, oval, and square tubing in combined loading.
  - Iso-grid structures: basic theory, analytical techniques, characteristics and advantages, open iso-grid shear webs, cylinder in compression and bending, open and skinned iso-grid plates.
  - Tensegrity structures: Linear algebra, equilibrium, self-equilibrium analysis by symmetry, force density method.
  - Deployable structures: Stealing ideas from nature, folding membrane, elastic folding of shell structures, bi-stable structures, foldable tensegrity.

AEM 351: Aerospace Structures Lab
- Highlights:
  - Laboratory experimented on strain gage installation, stress analysis of aerospace structures.
  - Concept of aerospace materials.
  - Students analyze, instrument, build, and test the tail section of the aircraft STOL CH 750.
  - Students design, build, and test tensegrity structures.

AEM 251: Mechanics of Materials Lab
- Highlights:
  - Laboratory experiment on tension, compression, bending, torsion, stress transfer, pressure vessel, and combined loading.