Photo By Diana Nesukh | Capt. Jacob Roberts and Capt. Logan Ogden are researching ways to improve airfield...... read more read more
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Air Force civil engineers are united by a shared commitment to deliver exceptional service, always moving the needle forward and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Capt. Jacob Roberts and Capt. Logan Ogden forged a bond rooted in innovation at the Air Force Institute of Technology.
Embarking on a journey of learning and collaboration, the two met when they enrolled at the Graduate School of Engineering and Management. The one-and-a-half-year master’s program is robust and rigorous, requiring completion of 72 credit hours from August 2024 through May of 2025. “We've got a lot on our plate, but the mentoring and people make it well worth it,” Ogden said.
The journey that led Roberts and Ogden to cross paths started long before AFIT. Roberts was inspired by his dad to become an engineer. “I’ve wanted to be an engineer since I was a kid because I wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps, who was a mechanical engineer,” Capt. Roberts said.
Ogden, on the other hand, was drawn to playing with Legos and construction toys growing up, but wasn’t sold on becoming an engineer until he participated in Project Lead the Way in middle school and high school. “Project Lead the Way provides a STEM-based curriculum to public schools and private schools that I was able to sign up for,” Ogden said. His interest in engineering turned into a pathway for a career after taking computer aided, design (CAD), and biomedical engineering classes.
Today, the two are engaged in research that is focused on Rapid Airfield Damage Repair (RADR) applications. “During the process, we have to do a MOS selection, or Minimum Operating Strip, for planes to land on,” Roberts described. “The question we’re focused on is whether there is a way to determine the amount of risk to an aircraft based off the explosive weight.” With different types of runway materials and soils, Roberts and Ogden want to determine how much damage a runway can sustain, and what risk factors accompany it.
Ogden and Roberts are looking at the airfield in two different directions, specifically from the bottom up. In doing so, they are investigating the void that exists at a certain depth based on soil when a bomb explodes.
“We're analyzing the strength in the soil column between that void and the airfield to determine if there's any risk to the aircraft,” Roberts said. “If the soil is strong enough for an aircraft to move across but has variable conditions or voids at midfield, it introduces significant risk during takeoff.” The goal is to assess whether transitioning an aircraft over that area poses less risk compared to the start of the airfield.
AFIT receives questions from across the Air Force every year, and they compile a list of research topics for the Graduate Engineering Management program. With over 25 students in their class, Roberts and Ogden both bid on their research topic. “We felt like it had the most tie and substantial impact to the civil engineering community,” Ogden explained. After evaluating numerous factors, including their technical backgrounds, Roberts and Ogden were both chosen to research the topic they chose as their number one.
The research has been split between the two, with Roberts taking lead on coding while Ogden focuses on geotechnical analysis.
“Our areas of expertise go hand in hand,” Roberts described. “You have to have a geotechnical part to understand how the layers go together and how the stress is going to interact.” The collaboration between the two enables them to visualize and plan a product and user interface the Air Force can utilize or build off of.
The research has focused heavily on an in-depth understanding of soils, built mechanics, explosive engineering to understand how explosives work and how pressures are generated, geomaterial, tunneling, aquifers, deep water geology, and more. Once Roberts and Ogden had a multi-faceted understanding of the issue, they utilized an integrated development environment for coding statistical analysis to find a solution. From there, they began working on building a rough model for coding, ensuring an understanding of how the equations worked and how they can be transformed. Finally, the two took their findings and began validating them through a user interface to get a holistic view for the end user.
Due to the specificity and difficulty of their research topic, Roberts and Ogden have had to lean on data from the DOD community and expertise from Dr. Patrick Bassal, a PhD and Professional Engineer at Ohio State University. Through their collaboration with subject matter experts, they have been able to increase their breadth of knowledge.
“We would love to see this project all the way through to the end,” Ogden said. The two hope to see their research utilized for future validation and ultimately implementation at the base level. “The end goal is to create a model with a user interface that an EOD technician, or someone who knows explosives, will be able to use.”
While the work at AFIT has been rewarding, the people that Ogden and Roberts get to interact with make the program even more fulfilling. “We have the opportunity to make a lot of CE connections in the general program and even people from different programs,” said Roberts. “We are getting a good education and the ability to benefit the Air Force through our research. That’s the beauty of civil engineering: it is very dynamic, and no two days are the same.”
| Date Taken: | 10.22.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 10.22.2024 13:59 |
| Story ID: | 483672 |
| Location: | WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, OHIO, US |
| Web Views: | 53 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, The Way We CE: Engineering Safer Airfields with Soil and Science, by Diana Nesukh, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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