SAE Aero Design

SAE Aero Design is a yearly competition the challenges students to design, build, and fly remote controlled aircraft in one of three categories. Regular class is a cargo carrying aircraft with a 55 lb MTOW, 120-inch Wingspan, and 2200 mAh that heavily restricts the use of carbon fiber re-enforced plastics.

Responsibilities:

Regular Lead:

  • Project Scheduling

  • Task Assignment

  • Material Sourcing and Procurement

  • Sponsorship Relations

  • Feasibility Analysis

  • System Level Design

  • Project Outcome

Wing Lead:

  • Configuration Analysis

  • Preliminary Calculations

  • Structural Design

  • FEA & CFD Analysis

  • Non-Destructive Testing

  • Wind Tunnel Testing

Test Flight 1

The first test flight was conducted February 22nd and confirmed air worthiness of the design.

A sharp veer right during takeoff was observed and attributed to a misaligned landing gear during construction.

Pilot reported a tail-heavy feeling while flying

A large amount of deflection in the front landing wheels was observed but no permanent deformation in the aluminum wheels or damage in the Carbon fiber struts was observed

Download SAE Design Report

As part of the competition a report of the design is required. Limited to 30 pages double spaced it is light on details in areas but gives a good overview of the process the team went through to come to the final design.

Competition Results

Western Aero Design came 21st overall out of 35 teams.

10th in Design Score

23rd in Presentation Score

14th in Mission Score

This competition pushes teams to improve their design, communication, and problem-solving skills while working as a cohesive unit. As Western University’s first venture into the regular class I am proud of my team’s performance. while there is room for improvement, the team was able to achieve the goals set out at the beginning of the year:

  • Get a plane off the ground and land successfully

    • Successful flight before competition and a successful mission flight at competition

  • Manufacture two full planes for redundancy at competition

    • Both planes flown during competition

  • Place Top 10

    • Came 10th in design score

Lessons Learned

During competition there were some design flaws and decisions that held the team back from achieving the planes full performance.

Starting with the design flaw. The landing gear did not account for the bending moment experienced by the forward position of the wheel relative to where it connected to the motor pylon. While the first plane did not experience an issue with oversight manufacturing tolerances between the two planes were enough that the second plane was not able to support the weight of a loaded aircraft and lead to significant delays in the team’s ability to fly limiting the number of flights attempts the team was able to achieve over the weekend.

An oversight in decision making led to the first plane crashing on its first test flight at competition. The decision was to test the plane with a predicted payload given wind tunnel data and air density at the location of the competition. While the plane was able to take off, since it was at the top end of its payload capacity it was difficult to control and lead to our student pilot attempting to gently land in the grass instead of the runway. I failed to consider not only the engineering numbers on paper but also the experience of the pilot. This led to the team putting the pilot into a very difficult scenario on an aircraft he had only flown once before. With extensive damage to the first plane the backup plane was used for the remainder of the weekend.