Zachary McNulty

• Master of Engineering
• Research Assistant at University of Southern California

Thermal protection systems (TPS) are employed on space vehicles to protect against the heat fluxes faced upon re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. This work reports a method of 3D printing composite materials for TPS to reduce the time and cost associated with hand layup production methods. A phenolic resin system was tested to determine char yield,...

In this work, we present an inverse reinforcement learning approach for solving the problem of task sequencing for robots in complex manufacturing processes. Our proposed framework is adaptable to variations in process and can perform sequencing for entirely new parts. We prescribe an approach to capture feature interactions in a demonstration data...

Metal additive manufacturing technology that uses arc welding technology to deposit material is called wire arc additive manufacturing. Robotic manipulators that have a large workspace to size ratio are used to enable wire arc additive manufacturing. Wire arc additive manufacturing is gaining popularity due to the fast build time achieved by the hi...

The composite sheet layup process involves stacking several layers of a viscoelastic prepreg sheet and curing the laminate to manufacture the component. Demands for automating functional tasks in the composite manufacturing processes have dramatically increased in the past decade. A simulation system representing a digital twin of the composite she...

The composite sheet layup process involves stacking several layers of a viscoelastic prepreg sheet and curing the laminate to manufacture the component. Demands for automating functional tasks in the composite manufacturing processes have dramatically increased in the past decade. A simulation system representing a digital twin of the composite she...