Wright State Competes in International Aero Design Competition

Wright State University has been participating in the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Aero Design competition for over a decade. The competition is part of SAE's collegiate design series and it is an international event with countries from India, Poland, China, Brazil, and Canada to name a few. For more on all of the collegiate design series SAE offers follow this link: http://students.sae.org/cds/

The WSU 2016 team has four student members accompanied by a pilot and an advisor. Our pilot, Mark, is on the left followed by Nate, Marcus, Emily, and myself. Our advisor is Dr. Thomas, who took the picture.

The Aero Design competition takes place twice in the US and once in Brazil. The US has an East and West event; last year the 2015 team went to West in Van Nuys, CA. This year we went to East in Ft. Worth, Texas. There are three different classes in the competition: Regular, Advanced, and Micro; we did Micro class. The goal of our class was to design and build an RC plane that was small and compact that had to fit in a six inch outside diameter tube and be able to lift a high ratio of payload to plane weight. The shorter our case the more points we received and the higher the payload fraction the better. Below is a picture of our plane and case that we took to the competition and spent eight months to get there.

We did this as part of our Senior Design Project which we need to complete in order to graduate with our major, Mechanical Engineering. We had been working on this project since last semester and we went to competition March 10-14. During our time working on this project we performed numerous test flights in preparation, over thirty flights. Some teams never fly their planes before showing up and below is what happens. 

 

As part of the competition there are 3 parts, a design report, presentation, and flying. I'm not going to post our report or presentation since those are not as interesting and are over 30 pages of technical writing, though I did steal several photos from our presentation slides for this. 

At the competition we placed fourth in flight scores out of 19 teams in our class, and we were the first team to have a successful flight at the competition. The most important thing is that we beat University of Cincinnati's team by a landslide. The video above was right before us; some teams never had a successful flight. Below is our first flight of the day. 

Getting to and from Texas we were flying on a plane and on the way back home the TSA gave us some trouble. We use lithium polymer batteries, very common in RC planes, and they said it was suspicious and would not let us take the batteries on the plane. Though the TSA person tried to help us by seeing if we could check them in our bags instead of carry on, but TSA's website specifically says you are not allowed to check them because it could get damaged and can't be dealt with under the plane should something happen. So we ended up losing over $100 in parts because of that; Dayton International had no problem with them and even thanked us for not checking the batteries. At least we didn't need them anymore.