SAE AERO

Straight away there is a visible difference between the 2018-2019 plane and the 2017-2018 plane. Multiple failures included the separation of the fuselage into three separate teams. A team that wasn't able to communicate properly separated further causing several significant design flaws.

For the new design I oversee the entirety of the fuselage instead of mere sections and the design is driven by the ability to be as manufacturable as possible. All connections are supported with either dove-tail, square or slotted joinery to minimize the time required to assemble the structure.

ANSYS and Solidworks are used to analyze the aerodynamic capabilities as well as the structural integrity of the plane.

Throughout the winter break the design was finalized while the major structural components started the manufacturing process.

The building process started with a 50% scale model to fine tune the aerodynamics of the structure. The fabrication of the fuselage can be seen where soon afterwards the wing and tail were connected.

The half scale model versus a full scale assembly will save the team time and money and will be less of a risk if there are issues in the design and the plane crashes.

The 50% scale model was finished in January within a few days to find flaws in the part structure. Several changes were implemented and the final design can be seen with complete scaled down landing gear as well. The test flight was successful which moved the project to a full scale model

The full scale plane took longer than expected to complete while running into issues with the wing which was manufactured out of foam instead of wooden ribs. The plane was driven to Fort Worth Texas for competition where it passed inspection with slight criticism regarding the center of gravity placement.

The first day of flight had very poor flight conditions where cross wind gusts were destroying most of the planes. Our plane did not fly the first day but performed better than expected on the second day where the flight as well as the team's unveiling can be seen in the promotional video.

Due to the lack of performance on the first day most teams ended up receiving scores far into the negatives from large deductions. Our team did not plan on flying more than 12 tennis balls with payload so our raw flight score was tenth out of the entire competition. This ranking is not accurate to the official competition placement decided by SAE.

There are many improvements to be made with the plane's design including the lack of airfoils in the tail's design and the overall weight being too heavy to mention a few. Despite the challenges, the team overcame many obstacles to make everything happen and next year is looking good for competition as many new students have joined to participate in the program at NJIT.

The leaders of the team can be seen in the group photo. The leaders from left to right being landing gear, tail, project manager, wing, fuselage (myself), captain, treasurer, analysis and electronics.

The previous plane's flaws can be seen relatively easily in a few different categories. Not to dig into the design too much but the small wing span, bulky frame and sectioned fuselage are to name a few. All of these issues have been taken into account for the design of the new plane.

As the leader of the landing gear team throughout the 2017- 2018 year, I put together the main gear design using Solidworks. The actual assembly closely resembles the original design.

The design was cut into a sheet of 6061-T6 aluminum with the water jet that is available to the team throughout the NJIT Makerspace.

Below is an exploded view of my front landing gear design I created using Solidworks as well as a comparison of the main landing gear design and fabrication.