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Well it was another quick week - we have been juggling projects, exams, and design items this week, and it’s been organized chaos! Nonetheless, we still progressed in our analysis and a few other items for our design!
This week we completed our constraint analysis (see attached photo) - not surprisingly our largest constraint is takeoff considering we will be hand-launching our aircraft. We also did a successful flow-visualization experiment on a wing section of ours (this was a requirement for Aerospace Lab, see attached photo). We will be looking at the data collected from this experiment in more depth, but from preliminary results, the stall angle of our wing was around 10 degrees angle of attack, which corresponds to what we have been seeing in our analysis. Furthermore, our design that we will be presenting on is nearly finalized! We found a way to follow an airfoil design and still fit our wings in the box. We will have a uniform thickness on our wing, and just have it follow the mean camber of the airfoil we want. This wing design should allow us to carry our goal payload of 3.5 PVC pipes!
We have our final presentation coming up in a couple weeks so we’ll be kept busy getting our final 3D model completed, our plane put together, and getting our power system (motor and all) up and running and get the data regarding that. We’re very excited and anxious to get all of our preliminary things together and can’t wait to see our hard work pay off! Thanks for following and stay tuned for more updates!
One Team | One Mission | Forever Forward
Well this week was certainly a busy one! It's that time in the semester where it is completely crunch time!
Here are our updates:
All of our trade studies are completed! We have come to the conclusion that balsa wood is the best option for our wing material, a V-tail in pairing with ailerons is our best option for control surfaces, and we decided that a standard propeller is the better option over a foldable propeller. Trade studies allow us to make logical decisions on parts of our aircraft whilst also making sure we back those decisions with data as opposed to just saying "we liked this better".
Next, we had tons of materials and parts come in this week which is always fun because that means we actually are going to be able to begin building. Also, one of our motors came in so we'll be able to begin static and dynamic thrust tests using that motor.
Lastly, we are required to do a flow visualization lab for our aerospace lab project. So in order to be productive, we've decided to double dip into senior design by testing something like our wing design inside the wind tunnel. The pictures attached are photos of a 13" wing section that has foam attached to the front to give it curvature. We are going to monokote (plastic wrap essentially) the wing and then add tufts to the wing which will allow for flow visualization!
That's all for this week! Thanks for following and stay tuned for more updates!
One Team | One Mission | Forever Forward
Weekly update time!
This week was relatively slower on the design front, but we’re also waiting on the arrival of materials at the moment. Tuesday we sat down for close to two hours to hash out any lingering questions/thoughts on our design to ensure we are all on the same page with this build and schedule. We now have an updated schedule (shown in the attached pictures) and are working on trade studies as well as creating a preliminary 3D CAD model of our aircraft.
Since this week was on the slower side I figured I’d also take this opportunity on the weekly post to do a spotlight piece on “How Planes Fly”! As an aerospace engineer this is arguably the question I get asked the most.
Planes require a few things to fly properly: Lift, Power, Stability, & Control!
Lift is generated by the wings of the aircraft, hence why they help get the plane off the ground. Lift is based off of a principle discovered by a man named Bernoulli. From this principle we were able to gather how air reacts when flowing over a wing. As the wing is moving through the air, the air on top is going at a much faster speed than the speed of the air on the underside or bottom of the wing. Therefore, the pressure on top of the wing is lower, while the pressure on the bottom of the wing is higher! That higher pressure acting on the bottom of the wing then causes an upward force on the wing, know as lift! And that is how a plane is able to get off the ground! The more ya know right ????
Thanks for following y’all! We’ll have more updates next week!
One Team | One Mission | Forever Forward
Weekly update time! Well you could say this week we had a bit of “discovery”! Another part of that beloved design process. We realized that our preliminary design requires some minor tweaking. Wednesday evening consisted of about 3 hours of redesigning; however, after some careful study and some advice from our mentors, we are now back on track with our new and improved design! We only have a drawn up version of this design as of right now, but an actual static version is currently in the works. We are still planning on using materials such as balsa and carbon fibre; however, this time we’re going to be using a dihedral wing design, using the PVC (aka our payload) to assist in attaching our wing sections together. We’ll also be adding some curvature to our wing instead of just doing a flat plate. Lastly, we’ll be conducting some trade studies to set the design for our tail and our propeller! Stay tuned and thank you for following Horizon! One Team | One Mission | Forever Forward #discovery #design #aerospace
Hey everyone! Time for our weekly update! This week was a little different due to having two days off for Fall Break; however, we still managed to make some decent progress.
We had a nice tag up meeting with our mentors, got some good notes, and are now making our way to further build upon our preliminary design.
We've decided to stick with balsa wood and carbon fibre for our design as we see it being the most efficient and structurally sound (see picture below).
We're continuing both aerodynamic and structural analysis on our design and we're very excited to see the results of what we've put together! Stay tuned for more details and thanks for following along!
One Team | One Mission | Forever Forward
Hello everyone! This past week was definitely a successful one!
We are now officially registered for our Spring competition in Fort Worth, TX and we have now come to a final decision on our preliminary design! The picture attached shows this preliminary design, which is composed of a middle plate, two wing sections, and two rods which connect our elevator. In order to come to the conclusion of this design, we weighed our options by making a pro and cons list of a multitude of ideas. We established that the one pictured made the most sense!
Now, you may notice the static model shown in the photos is made of random materials; however, we had to work with whatever was around in order to get our ideas out there on the spot! It's all a part of that brainstorming and design process!
Moving forward we will be creating two versions of this preliminary design, one made with pink foam and the other made of balsa wood. We are so so excited to get building and to see if our design can actually manage to carry the payload we want!
