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To enhance our knowledge of planes and aerodynamics in general, we built a plane and experimented with adding a rubberband propeller for the plane to fly farther.
Fig. 1: Corner view of our foam plane without the propeller attached. As you can see, after sanding down the wings and body, we thought this design would be optimal for flight. However, what we failed to realize was the uneven sanding of our wings made the plane fly in unexpected ways.
Fig. 2: Top view of our foam plane without the propeller attached.
Fig. 3: Front view of our foam plane without the propeller attached.
Fig. 4: Front view of our foam plane with the propeller attached.
Fig. 5: Bottom view of our foam plane with the propeller attached.
For our plane to be able to have a propeller, we needed to cut out a section of the foam body, connect the rubber band to the back of the plane, and connect the propeller to the rubber band. As shown in Figure 5, we did just that, allowing for the rubber band to have a straight connection to the propeller and constantly untangle.
foam plane 4.MOVVideo 1: One of our trials for our plane. After testing, we realized that our wings were too far back on our plane, which caused the center of mass to be too far back and nose dive stright into the ground. So, we moved our wings forward and hot glued them so they would stay forward.
foam plane 5.movVideo 2: Another one of our trials for our plane. After testing, we realized that we sanded the wings of the plane unevenly, causing the plane to drift to the right. This meant that the left wing was thicker. We didn't have time to fix this issue, but if we did, our plane would've flown straight.
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