Monday, February 13, 2006

Education

Aerospace genius wins 2006 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize

MIT student Carl Dietrich has won the 2006 $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for his inventions intended to ease America's congested highways and major airports.

The Ph.D. candidate in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Aeronautics and Astronautics program received the award for a portfolio of novel inventions, including a new Personal Air Vehicle; a desktop-sized fusion reactor; and a lower-cost rocket engine.

Dietrich's most recent invention is a personal air vehicle concept he calls Transition - a flying car that relies on the nation's thousands of public-access airports to provide a practical transportation alternative to travelers whose trips range between 100 and 500 miles.

Dietrich's Transition can be driven on any surface road and requires only a sport pilot's license to fly. The SUV-sized vehicle can be stored in most home garages and has folding wings that enable it to operate both on the ground and in the air. It can carry two people with their bags up to 500 miles on a single tank of premium unleaded gasoline.

Dietrich and four MIT colleagues have recently launched a start-up company called Terrafugia to further develop the Transition and eventually bring it to market at a price that is accessible to the traveling and business public. He has patents pending for the Transition's overall configuration, deformable aerodynamic bumpers, embedded lights and license plate holder, and an RFID system for rapid access to local airports. But his invention portfolio touches other fields, as well.

In addition to his work in personal aircraft, Dietrich co-founded the MIT Rocket Team and holds a patent for his Centrifugal Direct Injection Engine (CDIE), a low-cost, high-performance rocket propulsion engine. It operates without a turbopump pressurization system, which greatly reduces its complexity and cost.

For his doctoral work, Dietrich is researching inertial electrostatic confinement fusion for spacecraft power and propulsion. This research grew out of an efficiency improvement he patented for a desktop-sized Penning Fusion Reactor.

The $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is awarded each year to an MIT senior or graduate student who has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or demonstrated remarkable inventiveness in other ways. A panel of MIT alumni and associates including scientists, technologists, engineers and entrepreneurs chooses the winner.