Greg Shinault, a senior in Mathematics at CSUB, recently won one
of two Environmental SIG Awards at MAA Math Fest 2007. His
presentation, Modeling of fuel consumption, was done under
the direction of Dr. Yangsuk Ko, as part of his research in the CSUB
McNair program . It is exciting because only 13 of the 162
participants at MAA Math Fest won an award. Further, Greg was
one of only two awardees from CSU system.
Environmental SIG Awards
Gregory Shinault of California State University Bakersfield
Modeling of Fuel Consumption
Conventional approaches to the problem of finding an energy
flight (a flight path minimizing the fuel consumption of an
aircraft) raise huge mathematical and numerical challenges which
involve a complex system of differential equations. A new approach
to the problem is attempted. The theory of calculus of variations
was tested in solving the problem of modeling the flight path of an
aircraft that minimizes fuel consumption. The approach yields a
boundary value problem (BVP) for a system of ordinary differential
equations (ODE) called the Euler-Lagrange equations. The numerical
result matches physical intuition and general characteristics of
commercial air flight.
