Students who built a drone for the ground forces won the award for the outstanding project at the 52nd Israeli Aerospace Science Conference

A group of students from the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering at the Technion won the first prize in student projects at the 52nd Aerospace Sciences Conference held this week in Tel Aviv and the Technion

A group of students from the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering at the Technion won the first prize in student projects, at the 52nd Aerospace Science Conference held this week in Tel Aviv and the Technion.

The students, under the guidance of the aerospace industry expert Shlomo Tzach, built a drone for the ground forces. They participated with him in the DBF (Design, Construction, Aviation) competition held in the USA and won first place among the largest aircraft and in writing a report (score 98.5, with a comment: "This is the best report ever written in the competition"). In the general competition (large and small pilot instruments) they came in eighth place out of 88 teams that competed, from the USA and around the world.

The competition in the USA is organized by AIAA, the Aeronautics Organization in the USA, the main body that takes care of the development of aviation technology and infrastructure in the USA.

"The wingspan of the drone that the students built is 1.90 meters and weighs about four kilograms," says Shlomo Tzach. "The project contributes a lot to students, especially in their professional path further down the road. It is run like a project in the aerospace industry, with procurement, logistics, twins and a work plan that is updated every week."

Shlomo Tsekh graduated from the Technion in 1970 and has worked for 42 years in the aerospace industry. He has already trained hundreds of students. "The generation is not diminishing," he says. "A group that does a project like this - knows what development is."
Yaakov Ben Shoshan, Yossi Yoresh, Gal Klein, Yitzhak Shiroki and Iti Strauss, five soldiers from the Air Force, won the Niv-Ya Durvan Award for the outstanding article at the conference. The article - "Dynamic behavior of a cable subjected to general excitation fields". In their work, the five focused on finding a mathematical solution to the behavior of a cable in disturbance - under various constraints.

As part of their project they tried to simulate the dynamics of the behavior of a cable under a rule excitation field. For example: a cable for refueling airplanes, a cable from the electric company, lowering an anchor in a flow or even a cable in civil aviation that catches a remote while flying. Their goal was to check how the cable reacts under the interference and try to find solutions for this, where later they want to move to the experimental phase in order to answer the behavior of the cable, that is, to be able to control it even when it is under interference.

The team representative says: "We verified the mathematical formulas we proposed against existing models - solutions for the cable under excitation rules, and our next step is to move to experiments. In the end, one of our goals is to see at what speeds planes can be refueled."

Each of the soldiers will win 1000 shekels. The Niv-Ya award is named after the late Niv-Ya Air Force officer Durvan, who was murdered nine years ago on a quiet street in Tel Aviv by a robber. His parents, Rachel and Professor David Durban of the Technion established a fund in his name, with the aim of encouraging the writing of articles on innovation and initiative, which characterized their son. Every year the Technion holds a "Technorush" competition, which Niv-Ya initiated while he was a student at the Technion.

Prof. Ben Tzin from Georgia Tech University won the international award named after Prof. Meir Hanin, for a leading researcher in the world for significant contributions in the field of aeronautics and space. The late Prof. Meir Hanin was one of the founders of the Faculty of Aeronautics and Space Engineering in 1955.

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