Local Resident Wins Top Award for Research on Supersonic Rocket

Joseph David Wells, a resident of Baldwin Park is one of three students in a team who won the first place in the CSU Student Research Competition. 

Cal State L.A. mechanical engineering team Azizkhan Pathan, Joseph David Wells and Benjamin Liu took home first-place awards from the 27th Annual CSU Student Research Competition at Cal Poly Pomona.  

Awards for research and creative scholarly activity were presented to 40 outstanding CSU undergraduate and graduate students.

Participating at this event were approximately 200 students who had earned honors at their campuses.  

Cal State L.A.’s participants at the statewide competition were selected at a recent campus symposium on research and creative activities.

The symposium encourages all Cal State L.A. students—undergraduate and graduate in every discipline—to showcase their projects and provides opportunities to network with administrators, faculty and peers.  

 The research by Pathan (Victorville resident), Wells (Baldwin Park resident) and Liu (Temple City resident)—which took first place in the undergraduate division of the Engineering and Computer Sciences category—was focused on the design, fabrication, launch, and recovery of a supersonic experimental sounding rocket with a target apogee of 25,000 feet above ground level.  

The team’s presentation, entitled “Experimental Sounding Supersonic Rocket Design,” addressed their experiment that has been conducted to mitigate trajectory failures, prevent structural damage, and locate the system after impact using Iridium GPS.

A test rocket was used to begin the validation of computational programs and to verify design specifications of the final rocket. The team’s advisers are Darrell Guillaume, professor of mechanical engineering at CSULA, and Charles Hoult, a retired aerospace engineer.  

“Pathan, Wells and Liu, along with six others in the team, have been exceptional all year,” said Ted Nye, instructor for the Senior Design class at CSULA. “They have combined the best of engineering using modeling and analytical predictions, then correlating these to test results to achieve optimum rocket performance.”

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