SAE Aero Design East Compeition Winners

[caf]

Our University of Cincinnati team just won the Aero Design Competition beating the Brazillians who win annually. While other USA teams have beat the Brazillians, this is the first year a USA team has outlifted the Brazillians and beat them. We set the weight record lifting a payload of 35.27 pounds. Our aircraft weighed a mere 8 pounds 3 ounces.


For some background:
This competition sees which team can lift the most weight. We are given a commercially availible engine and have to design the rest of the airplane. No composite materials are allowed. The design requirements of the competition are listed below:
1) Must take off in 200 ft.
2) Must us the OS 61 FX engine
3) Length + Width + Height <= 225 inches (measurements on the plane)
4) Must be able to load the payload under 60 seconds and load the payload under 60 seconds.


The competition details:
We lifted 33 pounds our first flight just to apply a bit of pressure. This is the weight that won the West compeition. This was successful flight. For the rest of the day we flew at 20 pounds because there is a bonus for having successful flights.

The next day we decided to go for broke and lift our maximum weight on the first of two remaining flights (out of six). This was 37 pounds. We took off and everything looked great until a gust came and our plane fell like a rock and pancaked. Completely destroyed. The Brazillian teams ran out, saw our plane and started cheering. It seemed like they were going to win.

We got our plane back and it was completely mangled. I wish I had a picture of how destoryed it was, if I can find it I will post it. We actually built a prototype of the plane so we had a completely other plane. However you cant just fly another plane or you lose all your points. Atleast 50% of the plane had to be the original. So we chopped the fuselage off rebuilt our main wing attached the tail and fixed a broken rudder. All in 45 minutes. It took us weeks to build both the planes in our shop with professional parts. We frankenstiend this bitch in 45 minutes.

The judges were shocked we had fixed our plane, they didnt believe it. Thats how broke our original plane was. The rudder was so jerry rigged if you touched it it wiggled. We were cleared for flight and lifted 35.3 pounds on our last flight. As it landed all the USA teams started chanting "USA! USA! USA!". Its been ebarassing having a brazillian team lift more weight year after year. And we finally beat them.

Here are some photos of our plane:

For a sense of size, the wing span is exactly 12 feet long.

TAKEOFF!


Here are images of us rebuilding this thing with just some exacto knives and superglue:

Video of our first flight (33 lbs payload):
[video=facebook;936842418335]http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=936842418335[/video]

 

[dano_24_26]

I'm not saying anything. Congrats...

 

[ButterMPancakes]

Nice job. . . Max was just talking about the US needing some more victories

 

[KCOTT]

cool stuff

 

[bob2the2nd]

balsa or bass wood? I have to assume balsa because I think you would want the extra weight saver of balsa.

also I have done really well in competitions making balsa wood structures so this is a general design question, how did you determine where to put the ribs for the wings? were you using a computer program or was it testing?

also is that just red plastic wrap, heat wrap, something else?


A friend in middle school's dad built single man planes for competitions in the ultra light weight division or some such crap and these designs really remind me of that (the see through plastic material and stuff).

cool job!

 

[KCOTT]

yeah i was curious, too...what did you make the airfoils out of?

 

[KCOTT]

also, vid is unavailable

 

[The Voice]

What was the prize other then bragging rights?

 

[caf]

balsa or bass wood? I have to assume balsa because I think you would want the extra weight saver of balsa.

also I have done really well in competitions making balsa wood structures so this is a general design question, how did you determine where to put the ribs for the wings? were you using a computer program or was it testing?

also is that just red plastic wrap, heat wrap, something else?


A friend in middle school's dad built single man planes for competitions in the ultra light weight division or some such crap and these designs really remind me of that (the see through plastic material and stuff).

cool job!

The fuselage is made with four spruce stringers from front to back. The truss network in between these spruce stringers is a medium grade balsa. The engine mount is made out of aircraft ply atached to the fuselage with bass wood. The ribs and spars are made of balsa also. The use of the wood was determined based on what type of loads each member would most likely see. Since the engine vibrates and is realtively heavy we had to use bass up front. The spruce stringers were used because of the large moment the tail makes to counteract the pitching moment of the main wing. But 80% of the aircraft is balsa.

And yes the red plastic is a heat wrap called monocoat. Basically it has a side that is slightly sticky and you iron it on to adhear the monocoat and then blow dry it to shrink it.

If you look closely there is a main spar up front and a rear spar in the back of the foils (wing/horizontal tail/vertical tails) these ribs are capped on the front to give a nice round leading edge. In short the ribs are not actaully load bearing (they are, but their load is minimal since the main spar was placed where the aerodynamic force acts). The placement of the ribs was determined solely to ensure that the wing shape is maintained since there is going to be a bowing of the monocoat when it is heat wraped.

 

[caf]

What was the prize other then bragging rights?

$1000 to the winning team. goes to about $150 per person. Plus meeting a ton of employers in the industry who judge the competition, and being able to put this on my resume make it pretty valuable.

Also a pride thing. A lot of work and effort went into making this. I spent a month doing computations deciding what airfoil shape would give us the best flight characteristics. I also did some of the engine testing which was pretty fun.

 

[caf]

also, vid is unavailable

It works for me, its an embedded facebook video. You should just be able to click on it and it will play and come up with the controls.

 

[The Voice]

It works for me, its an embedded facebook video. You should just be able to click on it and it will play and come up with the controls.

It's not visible due to your privacy settings I believe.

 

[The Oi]

This kind of stuff makes me feel so stupid :sad:

 

[Soda]

Cool. Congrats.

 

[Blink]

Congrats,

I was on the OSU Aero Design team, and I know how much extra work this adds to an undoubtedly busy class schedule. I also know what it's like to watch all of that hard work nose dive straight into the ground, so kudos to you for gutting it out and getting it fixed.