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Engineering |
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Henry
Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science |
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Reaching for the Stars, Aerospace Student Excels
By Marlys Amundson
For
most students, pursuing a double major in aerospace engineering
and physics at UCLA would be enough of a challenge, but Robert Lobbia
also led the AIAA hybrid rocket space projects group, visited local
schools with other students to engender an interest in science,
and completed graduate-level lab work in the Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering Department.
Since his freshman year Lobbia has worked as an undergraduate research
assistant in the MAE Combustion Research Laboratory, headed by Professors
Ann Karagozian and Owen Smith. His first project was programming
in C to control a small-scale, onboard computer in a NASA flight
test experiment, and more recently worked on software to control
droplet combustion in microgravity conditions.
“Robert has accomplished at least as much as our best master’s-level
students at UCLA,” notes Karagozian. “We are very lucky to have
someone of his caliber in the department - he is very focused and
committed to his studies, his research, and the community.”
Karagozian later assigned Lobbia to work on controller development
for a research project involving the actively controlled jet in
crossflow. Under the guidance of Karagozian’s MAE collaborator,
Professor Robert M’Closkey, Lobbia created an inverse filter and
added a feedback mechanism to the actuation system to improve jet
injection performance.
“Robert is very impressive not only in his contributions to this
project but in his ability to juggle other projects and produce
great results,” says M’Closkey. “He had taken several undergraduate
courses that provided some of the technical background required
for the research project, and this shows that a motivated undergraduate
can become a useful contributor in the lab.”
Lobbia expects to graduate in June, and plans to go on to graduate
school to study the control and containment of plasma flows. He
is especially interested in unconventional areas of rocketry such
as ion propulsion, where only a limited amount of thrust is produced
and the power source can provide thrust for an extended period of
time.
Passionate about high-speed travel since he was a child, Lobbia
began building his own rockets and engines at a very early age,
“although it wasn’t until I began learning engineering principles
that the rockets were successful,” he notes.
Lobbia joined the UCLA chapter of AIAA as a freshman and has been
its president and head of its Hybrid Rocket Project for several
years. Students involved with this project are designing and building
a rocket capable of traveling 20 miles straight up - to the edge
of space. To date, the students’ field tests (conducted in the Mojave
Desert) have resulted in a rocket capable of ascending to 6000 feet.
The rocket has an onboard computer to measure acceleration and atmospheric
pressure, as well as a GPS computer and video camera.
Initially Lobbia was primarily responsible for the overall design
and implementation, including writing computer simulations and performing
design calculations for the rocket system, but he has been encouraging
others to take leadership roles this year. “My goal is not only
to finish the projects we have under way, but also to ensure that
the group will continue after I’ve left UCLA, so I’ve been sharing
all that I learned as a member of AIAA,” he explains.
As a freshman, Lobbia led the UCLA chapter of the Grassroots Science
for Kids, a program designed to encourage undergraduates from a
variety of fields to design and perform small-scale, hands-on science
projects for local elementary and middle school students. Lobbia
helped design the experiments, obtain the materials, and arrange
the demonstrations at the schools.
Last year Lobbia received one of 30 AIAA Foundation undergraduate
scholarships awarded nationally, and was the first recipient of
the Next Century of Flight scholarship.
Photo: Catherine Jun, UCLA Daily Bruin |
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COPYRIGHT
2004 UCLA |
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