Our JTech paper on the 2022 New Mexico high altitude balloon flight has published! Great job to lead author Tim Cheng!

Tim J. Cheng, Chris Yoder, Tara Curran, Freidlay Steve, Don Banfield, and Robert D. White, “Test Flight of a Stratospheric Sonic Anemometer Prototype” Journal of Atmospheric and Ocean Technology, published online October 17, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-24-0010.1

A podcast describing some of our work on the Mars Sonic Anemometer (and Tufts High Altitude Sonic Anemometer) is now live! Thanks very much to AIP Publishing and the Acoustical Society of America for taking the time to produce this and helping spread the word on the Mars Sonic. Many thanks to co-authors Don Banfield and Ian Neeson particularly, and to NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration for funding and supporting this work.

Across Acoustics, “Ultrasound Transducers for Measuring Martian Wind Speeds” ASA Publications Office Podcast, Robert White and Kat Setzer, August 26, 2024. https://lnkd.in/gvtDcC-m

After many years of effort, our JASA paper on ultrasound transducer characterization for the Mars Sonic Anemometer has published! Very excited to see this finally go to press.

Robert D. White, Rishabh Chaudhary, Zijia Zhao, Luisa Chiesa, Ian Neeson, and Don Banfield “Modeling and characterization of gas coupled ultrasonic transducers at low pressures and temperatures and implications for sonic anemometry on Mars” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 156, pp 968-988, (2024). https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0028008

RIshabh and Prof. White traveled to Las Vegas for the AIAA Aviation Forum and presented two papers.

Rishabh Chaudhary, Robert D. White, Zarina Kosherbayeva, Donald Banfield, Anthony Colaprete, Ian Neeson, Andrew Powell and Andi G. Petculescu. “Ultrasonic Measurement of Helium Abundance in Hydrogen for Planetary Science,” AIAA 2024-3851. AIAA AVIATION FORUM AND ASCEND 2024, July 2024. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2024-3851

Robert D. White, Rishabh Chaudhary, Tim J. Cheng, Benjamin Fisher, Julia Huckaby, Donald Banfield, et al. “Flow Testing of a Digital Sonic Anemometer for Martian and Stratospheric Environments,” AIAA 2024-3933. AIAA AVIATION FORUM AND ASCEND 2024, July 2024. https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2024-3933

The group traveled to Ottawa for the Acoustical Society of America meeting. We presented four papers, two of which won “Best Student Paper” awards in Engineering Acoustics!!

Rishabh Chaudhary, Robert D. White, Zarina Kosherbayeva, Don Banfield, Anthony Colaprete, Ian Neeson, Andrew Powell, and Andi Petculescu, “Acoustic Signatures of Helium Abundance in Hydrogen for Planetary Science” in the 186^th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ottawa, May 13-17, 2024. 

Julia Huckaby, Robert D. White, Ian Neeson, Don Banfield, and Anthony Colaprete, “Wind Shadowing of a Sonic Anemometer in Low Reynolds Number Flows” in the 186^th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ottawa, May 13-17, 2024. Best student paper award in engineering acoustics.

Maijie Xiang, Robert D. White, and Jonathan Bernstein, “PCB-based Miniature Vibro-Tactile Display for the Visually Impaired” in the 186^th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ottawa, May 13-17, 2024. Best student paper award in engineering acoustics.

Georgios Karamanis, Jonathan Anderson, Lalitha Parameswaran, James Vlahakis, Livia Racz, Daniel Freeman, and Robert D. White, “A Fluid Filled MEMS Hydrophone” in the 186^th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ottawa, May 13-17, 2024.

A paper on the use of our MEMS cryogenic microphone nodes for quench detection in superconducting REBCO tapes just published. Many thanks to our collaborators Makoto Takayasu at MIT and Luisa Chiesa at Tufts for pushing this work forward!

M. Takayasu, R. White, L. Chiesa, A. Desai and M. Emerling, “REBCO Conductor Quench Detection Tests for MEMS Acoustic Sensor Array Diagnostics,” in IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, Feb 6, 2024. doi: 10.1109/TASC.2024.3362761.

Congrats to PHD candidate Maijie Xiang for passing the PHD Qualifying Exams in Mechanical Engineering! Great work.

Prof. White traveled to the University of Aarhus, Denmark to test the Tufts Sonic Anemometer in the Mars Simulation Wind Tunnel. This unique facility allows testing under known flow conditions at reduced pressures. We tested both at 6 mbar in CO2 (Mars surface conditions) and at both 11 mbar and 4 mbar in air (stratospheric conditions on Earth) with relevance to both the Tufts Stratospheric Sonic Anemometer project and the Mars Sonic Anemometer project. The instrument performed very well, with resolution on the order of 2 cm/s, and within approximately 10% of laser doppler flow measurements at speeds up to 11 m/s. We also confirmed the importance of wake calibration for absolute accuracy, and will be making additional efforts using Computational Fluid Dynamics and experiments to provide updated calibration tables to improve to better than 10%.

PHD student Maijie Xiang has joined the group. Maijie comes to us from Boston University, where he completed his MS in Materials Science and Engineering, working on photo-acoustics in Prof. Chen Yang’s group. Maijie will be working on MEMS vibroacoustic sensors at Tufts.

The Tufts sonic anemometer flew to 122,000 feet over New Mexico on August 18, 2023. We spent 2 hours at float altitude. Total flight time was 5 hrs. 11 minutes. Many thanks to NASA Balloon Programs Office and Columbia Scientific Ballooning Facility for providing the opportunity to fly! Data will be returning soon for processing.