KEVIN TAKYI YEBOAH

I lived a stone’s throw away from the only international airport in Ghana growing up. I was always awestruck by the impressive roar, majestic ascent and gliding descent of airplanes taking off and landing. Pausing to soak in the panorama on my walks to and from elementary school, I often stood spellbound and aghast at each sighting, curious about the phenomena that sustained this marvelous feat of engineering in the skies. My childlike curiosity guided my interests into adolescence, and I grew increasingly passionate, adventurous, resolute and proactive about understanding, exploring and recreating these experiences. I became utterly enamoured with the forces and moments that mediate the interplay of engineered aero-space interactions by the time I took my first physics lesson on mechanics in grade school – and my participation in the 2018 International Physics Olympiad in Lisbon, Portugal as a delegate of the Ghanaian team reinforced my enthusiasm. As I came of college age and discovered there was a fitting program that could appropriately steward my passion to ponder and solve problems in engineered human-machine-aerospace interaction systems and operations, I knew it was perfect for me. This fuelled my enthusiastic pursuit of an undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering at the esteemed Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana.
While expanding the horizons of my knowledge and insights as a KNUST scholar, I began to better understand at an advanced level, the things that ignited my interest in Aerospace Engineering. I came to appreciate that the design of an air vehicle requires inter- and multidisciplinary knowledge, with the ability to appropriately integrate and effectively optimize a plethora of engineering ideas and principles to solve real-world aerospace problems. I therefore proactively pursued multidisciplinary research endeavors to accumulate a wide variety of tools, depth and breadth of skillsets, and an expansive knowledge base to bolster my capacity and capability for problem-solving and innovation in aerospace engineering research and relevant applications. I collaborated with Prof. Kwasi Kete Bofah (PhD Aeronautics, Caltech ‘76), Professor of Aerodynamics at KNUST, on a research project to investigate the nature of trailing vortices and vortex-shedding behind a hemispherical body in a turbulent boundary layer. Consequently, I observed that the separated flow behind the body can be modelled as the shedding of “von Kármán”-type vortices which can be represented by the first three energetically dominant nodes. This endeavour exposed me to the impact of trailing vortices on lift and drag of bodies in subsonic flows, subsequently setting me on a self-driven mission to improve Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) wing design using computational fluid dynamics techniques. In line with these interests and exploits, I initiated and spearheaded several projects, including leading a group of students on hands-on research projects to apply insights I obtained to improving existing UAV and VTOL wing designs in the Aerospace laboratory. I joined the KNUST Innovation Centre to gain operational expertise in flight controller design and usage. I obtained hands-on experience with the Ardupilot APM 2.8, OpenPilot CC3D and H7 flight controller boards, which I subsequently deployed on UAV and VTOL designs amongst others.
As my horizons broadened and my knowledge accrued with experience, I enthusiastically shared my evolving multidisciplinary expertise and passion in air vehicle design and aerospace systems with others through peer tutorials, mentorship and collaborative lab projects. In affirmation of my empathetic mentorship of peers and juniors in the department, I was appointed academic board chairperson for the Association of Aerospace Engineering Students (AAES), where I taught 92 undergraduate-students Aerodynamics I & II, Propulsion, Mechanical Vibrations, Control Systems and Orbital Mechanics. This resulted in a monumental increase in their sense of appreciation for these courses and academic performances. My leadership prowess became more perceptible when I spearheaded and supervised 10 students to collate, annotate and digitize a comprehensive database of 52,000 problems and solutions across different Aerospace Engineering courses – a tool students and professors rely on for learning and teaching purposes to this day. I deployed high-level computer programming and software development expertise to incorporate this database into a full-scale web-based application for an enhanced, interactive learning experience in Aerospace Engineering – a legacy contribution that other departments in the college are emulating. My interests and corresponding accomplishments in these endeavours earned me, the highest annual academic achievement award in the department, Provost List’s Best & Excellent Student of Aerospace Engineering, an honour I received repeatedly for three consecutive years from my sophomore to my senior year.
Relying on engineering design principles for my final year project, I designed, fabricated and tested a fully autonomous Vertical Take-off and Landing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (VTOL UAV) for the acquisition of security intelligence along Ghana’s maritime borders. In this project, I made use of additive manufacturing techniques and tools such as Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) 3D printing with the Creality CR-X Pro 3D printer and 3D modelling with the Solid Works and Siemens NX Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Software. In line with this, I assessed and analyzed Ghana’s potential to produce low environmental-impact VTOL UAVs for maritime security at scale, supporting the government’s initiative to achieve goal 16 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDG) to promote peaceful and inclusive societies. In this position, I also relied on my social skills, multi-lingual programming proficiencies and statistical tools to collect and analyse data on local sourcing mechanisms for materials, machinery and equipment to manufacture and maintain drones for maritime border security operations. The insights from my contributions on the project supported naval force efforts to improve the speed, efficiency, and safety of maritime border protection activities, reducing operational costs and risks to naval officers’ lives. As a Research Engineer at Wingxtrer technologies, I conduct research on the aerodynamic impact of distributed electric propulsion, and explore the potential for this emerging technology to transform air vehicle design by optimizing the synergistic benefits of aero-propulsive coupled systems. My research in this position generates insights into mitigation mechanisms for trailing vortex impact on lifting surfaces, by leveraging increases in dynamic pressure across blown surfaces for improved lift performance. In this work, I systematically investigate the utility of distributed electric-propulsor thrust streams for enhanced-capability vehicle-control. This includes developing research protocols and experiments to test mechanisms for reducing requirements for traditional control surfaces, and increasing vehicle-control system tolerance to engine-out or propulsor-out scenarios. This research promises to significantly lower community noise during takeoff and landing segments of flights, enabling higher VTOL UAV propulsive efficiency.
The main areas I am keen to study and research more about are autonomy, controls, robotics and distributed electric propulsion. My career aspiration is to become an autonomy and control specialist at a reputable organization at the frontier of research and innovation in the aerospace industry. Ultimately, my mission is advance the bounds and limits of human knowledge and understanding of what’s possible for travel in and beyond the spaces around us.