Team 507
Florida Space Grant Consortium
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Simone Hruda
Aerodynamics Engineer, Fuselage Engineer
Loading Engineer, Connections Engineer
Systems Engineer, Landing Gear Engineer
Two senior design teams’ shared
objective is to design and build a 3D printed, radio-controlled airplane to
compete in the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Aero Design competition. The
plane must take-off within 100 feet, and land within 400 feet while carrying a payload,
this being a 9in diameter soccer ball, and a 1lb weight.
Team 507 focuses on the fuselage of the plane, the
fuselage being the section where the electronics and payload are housed, as
well as the landing gear. This year’s fuselage
features a streamlined design that appears whale-like to reduce drag on the
plane as much as possible. A hatch on
top of the plane opens to load and unload the payload. The landing gear of the plane is arranged as
a tail-dragger configuration meaning, two wheels are placed close to the front
of the plane and one wheel toward the rear section of the plane. The front two
wheels are resting under the wings to increase stability on land and decrease
landing impact, and the back wheel is placed close to the tail.
The partnering team, Team 508, is responsible
for the wings, tail, and electronics of the plane. The fuselage accommodates the design
decisions of the partnering team, Team 508.
Those design decisions being a low-wing with dihedral configuration
meaning, that the tips of the wings are higher than where the wings connect to
the plane. The team decided to select a standard tail. The entire plane aside from the landing gear
and electronics is 3D printed using light-weight PLA, a filament made of
plastic and foam. The main challenges the
team overcomes in this project include designing the fuselage for printability
and structural integrity.
Click above to download the design process our team went through to arrive at our final design. This document includes: Project Scope, Customer Needs, Functional Decomposition, Target Catalog, Target Summary, Concept Generation, Concept Selection, and Project Plan.
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