Ocean engineering assistant professor Travis Hunsucker ’11 M.S., ’16 Ph.D., is Florida’s featured expert in “50X50: Science Across America,” a new YouTube series from the Independent Media Initiative pairing 50 scientists with 50 content creators across all 50 states to spotlight American science.
Hunsucker was paired with Jeremiah Burton, an engineer and co-founder of the YouTube channel BigTime, which has 1.95 million subscribers. Burton, a Melbourne native, returned to his hometown to film a video on the hydrodynamics of a custom-built airboat he’s fitting with a 1,000-horsepower engine.
“I was contacted to see if I could provide some guidance on the hydrodynamics of high-speed planing hulls,” Hunsucker said. “It sounded like a fun project, so I said ‘Yes.’”
Burton asked Hunsucker to help break down the physics behind why high-speed planing hulls like his can become unstable.
“What generally makes a planing hull unstable is, as it goes faster, you start to change the lift characteristics,” Hunsucker said, adding that certain hull designs can develop chine walking or porpoising, a dynamic instability that, left unaddressed, can lead to capsizes or crashes.
Burton said the project let him blend his engineering background with his roots in Florida’s airboat culture.
“The practical nature of airboats is super interesting to me and a core part of Florida outdoor life,” Burton said. “I thought blending these two things together in a field where the technology hasn’t changed so much over the last 40 years would be cool to tackle it from a more engineering-focused mindset.”
Burton said the goal of the video is to show young viewers that science and engineering careers take many forms.
“You don’t necessarily have to wear a lab coat to be a scientist or engineer,” Burton said. “There are so many different facets of engineering. The main thing we want to do is get people excited about engineering-focused jobs, pique their curiosity and see how scientists actually are, not how Hollywood portrays them.”
The Florida episode is now available on the BigTime YouTube channel.
