Undergraduate Research: An Archive - 2021 Program

Charlotte Wallace ’21
MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE
ENGINEERING
Senior Thesis Research Funding Awardee
THESIS TITLE
Sensor-Integrated
Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle: A Pilot Design
for Albedo Monitoring
ADVISER
Marcus Hultmark,
Associate Professor of
Mechanical and
Aerospace Engineering
While climate change is a growing issue, there
remain vast unknowns regarding monitoring and
mitigation methods across various geographical
locations. Currently, satellites are the main
source of environmental monitoring, but their
scope is incredibly large and does not provide
a specific picture of the problem. This project
provided a portable, easily adaptable solution
via a pilot design for environmental monitoring.
By equipping a drone with thermal and visible
imagery and a pyranometer, specific regions
can be more consistently monitored at a higher
resolution than with satellites. The pyranometer
measures both solar radiation and reflected solar
radiation, which enables researchers to measure
the albedo on any given surface. Albedo provides
crucial insight into the heat balance for a region.
An albedo visualization program was developed
in MATLAB to produce graphics overlaid with
orthomosaics, providing researchers with an
easily readable and understandable set of plots
with which to interpret data. The data analyzed
in this paper verifies the efficacy of this design
— with some modifications — to measure albedo
with a fair degree of accuracy in a variety of
geographic regions and times of day.
ENVIRONMENTAL
ENGINEERING
This thesis was conducted with Kaley Ubellacker
’21 (page 27).
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