Propulsion Lead - MachWorks

What Is MachWorks?

MachWorks is a student led design team based out of Virginia Tech. At a high level, we’re looking to be the first collegiate team to fly a supersonic aircraft. That is qutie the mountain to climb though so we’ve broken that down into 3 steps. The first aircraft, Icarus, will serve as the team’s, and the universities, introduction to jet powered flight. Our aim, past building a custom aircraft, was to build a platform that could be used as a test bed for future aircraft.

The team itself was ‘founded’ in early 2022 by Taylor Ransford although nothing really came of his leadership. There were some informal meetings and an attempt to organize the team, but with classes and graduation looming, things fell through. Taylor and the previous team designed an aircraft that had some validation behind it to go supersonic. This included a graduate student who supposedly ran some CFD analysis on the aircraft and helped form the outer mold line of the plane. (Insert pic here). While that plane could work, it did not have a full internal structure nor a plan for how the plane would actually get off the ground. It was not long after this that Nathan Collins and Jeff Filer took over the team with a stronger will to get things moving.

Thanks to some good relationships and lucky timing, MachWorks was able to move into the Advanced Engineering Design Lab and secure funding to move toward our first designs.

How I Got Involved

My participation in MachWorks is actually thanks to a friend of mine Drew Burcher who asked me to attend an interest meeting that Taylor had arranged. I was hesistant but went since Drew couldn’t attend thanks to an exam.

At the meeting I quickly fell in love with the idea of a supersonic collegiate built aircraft, even if it seemed impossible. Rewinding a bit, Jeff was my team lead on the Launch and Recovery Team. It was here that I was first exposed to how design team’s work and how organized Jeff really is. He did a great job and we later found out that our subteam, thanks largely to Jeff’s efforts, was really the only active one before the leadership transition.

Jumping back to after leadership had changed, I knew that i wanted to be apart of the Propulsion team. I had fallen in love with jet engines just before hearing about this team and things seemed to align well. I landed as a member at first but I wanted more. Nathan and Jeff, wanting things to be somewhat formal, looked to interview me and another AOE student. Hearing back, I did not get the position of leader but they wanted to keep me on as a member. However, I did not read the email and thanks to Drew, I ended up attending what was supposed to be a leads only meeting. Reading the email after the meeting made things a lot clearer, namely why Nathan and Jeff seemed surprised to see me there. Nonetheless, I had successfully wiggled my way in. However, they had dedcided on a lead and assistant lead structure where I would function as the assistant. I was not pleased at this but moved on glad to be involved. As the semester progressed, my responsibilites grew as my lead, although she is a great person, seemed to do less and less. Come to find out she had other commitments and left the team to find success elsewhere.

And so I find myself at the head of the metaphorical ship, not really knowing what I’m doing but having a semesters worth of ‘experience’ under my belt. Knowing what went into steering this ship, I pushed for co-leads; splitting the subteams in half reducing the workload any one lead had to do. Seems to have worked out nicely.

My Leadership Philosophy

Having been on a limited number of teams previous to my leadership on MachWorks, I can’t speak to the ups and downs of good and bad leaders. I have certainly worked in some groups for classes where things went awry, but never on a proper design team where motivation wasn’t just a letter grade.

I try my best to have faith in people. That is, I try to let people govern themselves. I lead when needed and get out of the way so people can work. I try to get my meetings to feel more like a conversational hangout than a super formal event. I communicate as much as possible, to a fault I’ve been told. I feel that if everyone is informed on everything that will affect them, then the team runs better. I aim to let people work and design however they see fit so long as the task is getting done. Most recently that has meant a push for a part that barely works. But I have been told, and find it to be true, that in engineering good is the enemy of finished. That is to say, there will always be something that can be changed - code can be optimized, the part can get lighter, stronger, cheaper, etc, but those all take time. I much prefer my members to have something that barely works than spend twice as long on something that works perfectly for it is far easier to refine a design than it is to make it in the first place.

Projects I Lead

From the beginning, the propulsion team has always been seen as a massive money pit. This idea extends to industry where companies will essentially gamble their existence on a new engine selling properly. Improvements are extraordinarily expensive, but neccessary.

To date most of my projects have been focused on essential parts of the propulsion system. This started with the aircraft intake, lead to an attempt at a custom developed engine model, and encompasses a test stand for our engine system. Although, going into the Fall ‘25 semester, I no longer oversee any of those projects. I have moved over to pure ‘research and development’. Which is where the real fun starts.

In January I took over the Afterburner team from a senior who was too busy and more focused on senior design (can’t fault the guy). The design we had was incomplete, unrealistic, and worst of all took the better part of the summer of ‘24 and the Fall ‘24 semester to develop. Over the course of the semester, my team and I put together a 3D printed prototype of the afterburner with hard numbers and simulations to back up our work. If you are interested in the program that came out of this initial development cycle, see this post.

Moving toward the Fall ‘25 semester, my team and I are looking to manufacture, and hopefully run, this afterburner. Budget concerns have been growing as funding doesn’t usually come until late in the semester, but there are still things to work on. Namely, a nozzle.

As we developed the afterburner, the nozzle challenge grew. Due to simplicity, we started with a simple static converging nozzle. However, my nozzle team will be spending the next year developing a variable area nozzle such that we can optimize thrust performance for an altitude and fuel flow rate into the afterburner. Stay tuned for updates on both these systems.

My Legacy

While my time at MachWorks has been lengthy, all good things must come to an end. For me, that end date is May 2026 as I’m set to graduate and move on to bigger things.

While I am a pessimist at heart, I do think that MachWorks will eventually reach supersonic. I do however, caveat that with a massive timeline. I don’t think it’ll happen for another decade at least just based on manufacturing, budget, and paperwork requirements. That being said, I know my impact will be small in the bigger picture. I won’t be around to have any say in how that final plane is designed (although I have been pushing for its name to be Hyperion). The systems I help ideate, though, those are what I hope will outlast me. Well that and Ignition.

The work I have done with this team has pushed me farther as an engineer than I had every dreamed. I picked up skills, learned words I didn’t know existed, and made some great memories, all thanks to Drew’s exam. Even if my thoughts, name, or any sign that I was here, now, disappears, I will always have the memories I’ve made. And for that I am eternally greatful.

Future Propulsion systems

There is a long road for this team to travel. I hope that some of my work makes the future MachWorks’ engineers lives easier. I hope that Ignition helps to design the massive engine/ afterburner system that will power the world’s first collegiate plane to supersonic speeds. I hope that my idea of turning the intake into a pseudo-bypass to feed the afterburner can actually be made real, and functional. I hope that my nozzle team can lay the foundations for an esential system future versions of this team will use.