Today in my class my professor had an interesting talk about his experience working for NASA on a top secret project regarding the Blackbird. Odd enough, us sophomore students could have solved the problem with our knowledge and a $1.50 worth of supplies. Anyways, the blackbird is a government spy plane that is supposed to be the fastest in the world. The plan was only outraced once by a Russian plane, but the Russian plane blew up after passing the Blackbird (proves nothing, except the Russian plane can't handle that speed!). The problem with the plane was with one of the engines. For a tenth of a millisecond one of the engines would randomly shutoff, leaving the plane with a huge amount of Torque and thus the plane would spin, making the pilots unhappily crash into the windshield, not good at all. Anyways my professor analyzed the problem to be with the shockwaves inside the engine. To make thrust for the airplane, the outside air is slowed down with a little mechanical system inside the engine area. This little mechanical system also had little opening doors that allow for more air to circulate. Anyways, shockwaves are produced inside this engine and they are randomly dispersed, usually the position of the shockwaves do not matter, but if a shockwave is produced at the very tip or opening of the engine, then Housten, we have a problem. The air is dispersed on the surface and thus the engine is deprived of much needed air for that tenth of a millisecond. The engine suddenly turns off....

The solution to the problem was being able to detect when the shockwave was at the tip of the engine and open certain doors to allow more air to circulate for this case. So what was needed was sort of likie a frequency detection device, to detect a certain frequency and at that certain frequency do a certain output... same type of material that we are learning in class oddly enough. The stuff is really simple. And from analyzing the frequency response of the engine and its graphs, we can correct the output by adding various circuit elements such as capacitors and inductors, resistors, adcs, etc... This was very interesting. The solution worked. Strangely enough, the air force had tried to correct this problem itself before NASA called my prof for help. Unfortunately, the airforce couldn't figure out the problem exactly, so if made a mechanism to shut off BOTH engines if the one should fail. They're reasoning was that you had so much altitude to fall and you would have enough time to recover and turn the engines back on. This was ok, but not desirable. This helped solve the huge amount of Torque caused by the engine failing.

Just thought that this was veyr interesting