News
VADL Provides Wind Power Demonstration
Nov. 23, 2015—VADL team members engaged students from Whites Creek Academy in a tour of Vanderbilt’s solar array and turbines set up by VADL faculty lead Dr. Amrutur Anilkumar.
Aerospace Club wins NASA’s Student Launch Challenge for third year in row
May. 12, 2015—For the third year in a row, the Vanderbilt Aerospace Club has won NASA’s eight-month long rocketry competition – the 2014-15 Student Launch Challenge – beating out 30 other university and college teams. Judges announced the Vandy team’s victory on Tuesday, a month following the launch day competition that took place on April 11 at Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama,...
Aerospace Club works on simulated Mars sample recovery vehicle for NASA competition
Dec. 4, 2014—The Vanderbilt Aerospace Club, defending champions in the NASA Student Launch Challenge for the past two years, is tackling the agency’s all-new 2014-15 design challenge. The rocket team is working on an earth-simulated Mars Sample Recovery Vehicle, which includes an Automated Ground Support Equipment Robot (AGSE) that autonomously places an encapsulated soil sample in a Mars...
Vanderbilt rocketeers win NASA Student Launch Competition — again
May. 30, 2014—On Saturday morning, May 17, on the storied Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the 10-foot, black-and-gold StarCRAFT rocket blasted into the still blue sky in a flawless flight that reached an altitude of 4,850 feet before popping its parachute and drifting serenely back down to earth. The students from Vanderbilt’s Aerospace Club who created and built the rocket were the...
Fun experiments fan middle schoolers’ interest in engineering
Nov. 22, 2013—Dimmig is a senior mechanical engineering student and president of the Vanderbilt Aerospace Club. Dimmig and seven other club members spent a Friday in late October at the Celina K-8 School in Clay County, Tenn., about 100 miles northeast of Nashville. They split teaching duties between fifth, seventh and eighth grade science classes, using frictionless fan...
Vanderbilt takes top prize in NASA student rocket launch challenge
May. 20, 2013—Vanderbilt engineering students won their first national rocket competition after April launch results were combined with technical design reviews and evaluations of written reports and outreach projects, including a website documenting the experience
Vanderbilt researchers, students part of inaugural SEC symposium on renewable energy
Feb. 10, 2013—Vanderbilt’s Aerospace Club represented the university in the SEC university showcase. The club displayed its fabricated ramjet engine prototype, designed to burn biohybrid fuel. The engine will be used to power the club’s rocket in NASA’s annual rocketry challenge in April. As part of the SEC Symposium, the showcase consisted of one booth per university...
Students use rocket flight to test thermoelectric generator for waste heat recovery
Jul. 9, 2010—Vanderbilt mechanical engineering students have designed a thermoelectric generator for aerospace applications that elicited strong accolades at the spring 2010 NASA-sponsored University Launch Initiative and won the Payload Design prize. It has no moving parts and can convert some of the waste exhaust heat into usable electrical power.
Vandy Aerospace Club gets big lift from launch win
Jun. 2, 2008—Vanderbilt’s Aerospace Club recently won a prestigious altitude contest when its rocket reached a height of 5,264 feet at a launch contest held in late April at a north Alabama farm. “The corn growing in that field will never taste as sweet as the success of our rocket,” said senior Nathan Grady, a member of...