Regulus - Deputy Program Manager for Engineers
As the Deputy Program Manager for Engineers (DPME) it my was job to lead a team of seven multidisciplinary engineers and contractors through the design, manufacturing, and qualification testing of three engineering deliverables within a year’s time: a Bend Strain Relief (BSR), a cart, and a cosmetic fairing.
Responsibilities and Conributions
Customer Interface
As DPME, I was the primary interface with the Prime contractor. I was responsible for providing weekly and monthly technical status reports; sharing our progress, impediments, and providing status of program risks.
Numerical Modeling
Iterating on BSR parameters with ANSYS to determine minimum length proved time consuming due to the nonlinear nature and large defections. We needed a way to narrow the scope of our ANSYS simulations. Utilizing multiple reference papers, I developed a generalized numerical model in Python which accounted for the nonlinear material and large deflections. I then posed an optimization scheme to minimize the length of the BSR while not exceeding a threshold minimum bend radius.
Team Leader
I lead the multidisciplinary team through Preliminary Design Review, Critical Design Review, Test Readiness Review, and Acceptance Review in a years time. To achieve this, continuous open communication was necessary, so I implemented scrum-style stand-up meetings and acted to resolve any challenges the team members shared. The team was also faced with the challenges of the COVID19 Pandemic and working from home was not authorized. I worked with the team to determine a work schedule that kept the facility and the team members safe.
ANSYS Post Processing
ANSYS cannot provide bend radius of a beam as an output, so we needed to determine how to calculate it from the simulation output. It turns out ANAYS can output the (x,y) locations of a series of points along the deflected neutral axis, so I wrote Matlab scripts to post process this data. The script smoothed the data and calculated bend radius as a function of beam length. It then plotted the data and output some relevant parameters so the user could place it into presentations.
Program Manager (For Engineers)
Working with Program Performance Engineers, I created and maintained a waterfall schedule to gather basic EVMS metrics. This schedule was updated bi-weekly to ensure progression through the plan was proceeding nominally.
Image Processing
Part of the data needed from qualification testing was minimum bend radius as a function of length along the BSR. To obtain this data, I wrote a Python program that utilized OpenCV which extracted the position of the neutral axis from a picture of the deformed geometry and implemented the bend radius calculation algorithm from the ANSYS post processing scheme. The program performs calibration of the camera, pixels per inch calibration, image thresholding, data filtering, and finally plotting the location of the minimum bend radius on the original image.