ABOUT
In the senior design project, we are required to design a small vertical takeoff and landing aircraft(VTOL) within the landing area of 1.2m circles, and the plane must carry a weight of 1.5kg with a minimum speed requirement of under 10m per second.
INITIAL DESIGN
We start off with 12 concept designs. Then we used Pugh's matrix and the house of quality to determine the most important qualities we need and to narrow down our selection on the concept. We have also merged several design concepts together to form the three concepts shown in the following pictures.
QUAD ROTOR
this design uses four-rotor as the lifting fan, and the front rotor will rotate toward horizontal mode during the fix-wing flight.
THE CROW
this concept uses three motor for the vertical takeoff, the rear motor is rotateable of pointing toward horizontal direction during flight.
PTERODACTYL
this concept uses four motor. The two big motors are used for generating lift during the vtol and the two small ones are used for roll control during vtol. The two small ones are also used to power during the horizontal flight.
Problem Arise
As we move forward on the design, we found the problem with the lack of lift during horizontal flight. To achieve the minimum speed requirements, we need to make changes to our design
THIS IS HOW WE CAME UP WITH THE BIWING DESIGN
BENIFIT
The bi-wing design actually provided several significant benefits. First of all the lift generated from the second wing. Although not doubling the lift, it does generate over 40% more lift with the aspect ratio we have. The second benefit is the weight reduction, the rigidity of the wing box formed by the bi-wing allows us to save about 150 grams of weight on the original plan of wrapping the wing.
DESIGN
To generate more lift we have used an S1223 high lift wing design. We have used software like xflr5, Solidworks, Ansys to analyze every perspective of our design in aerodynamic, structure, power, and other detailed design.
MANUFACTURING
During the manufacturing process, we have used foam to construct the wings and 3D printing for the fuselage, carbon fiber tubes for the lift truss. we have used a Qground control module to build our flight controller.
THE TEAM
Here's the team
