SAE Aero Design Competition: Kettering University
What is Aero Design?
The Aero Design competition is intended to provide undergraduate and graduate engineering students with a real-life engineering exercise. The competition has been designed to provide exposure to the kinds of situations that engineers face in the real work environment. First and foremost a design competition, studetnts will find themselves performing trade studies and making compromises to arrive at a design solution that will optimally meet the mission requirements while still conforming to the configuration limitations.
The importance of interpersonal communication skills is sometimes overlooked, yet both written and oral communication skills are vital in the engineering workplace. To help teams develop these skills, a high percentage of a team's score is devoted to the design report and the oral presentation required in the competition.
Aero Design features three classes of competition—Regular, Open, and Micro. Regular Class is intended to be simpler than Open Class, and therefore more accessible to the fledgling team. Open Class is intended to be less restrictive than Regular Class, thereby opening a larger potential solution set. Its lack of restriction allows teams to pursue more complex vehicle configurations, thereby encouraging greater creativity in satisfying the mission requirements. Micro Class teams are required to make trades between two potentially conflicting requirements, carrying the highest payload fraction possible, while simultaneously pursuing the lowest empty weight possible.
http://students.sae.org/competitions/aerodesign/about.htm
In 2009, I met a guy by the name of David Tarlau. I was interested in aircraft design, he flew RC airplanes... add in the fact that his local flying field hosts the Aero Design competition every other year, and the rest is history.
We started a team at Kettering in the summer of 2009, scrambling to find funding, a place to build in, and figuring out just how the heck we were going to design an aircraft with absolutely no experience in the topic. Along with a handful of other students, we miraculously managed to put together a flyable aircraft just barely in time for the 2010 competition (the week before finals, too!). Our first competition was - on the whole - an absolutely spectacular experience, with dozens of teams from all over the world showing off a tremendous variety of aircraft, and a general spirit of friendly competition and camaraderie which is absolutely addicting and defines the competition.
Despite a pretty poor overall performance for our first year, we left the 2010 competition infused with energy and creativity that would carry us on to our very successful 2011 competition year. Since our first design was oh-shit-let's-throw-together-something-that-works, we wanted to use our new-found experience to make up for our previous lack of creativity. While search the internet for interesting designs, I came upon Burt Rutan's Proteus... ...and the Terrific Tandem 1.0 was born.
We started a team at Kettering in the summer of 2009, scrambling to find funding, a place to build in, and figuring out just how the heck we were going to design an aircraft with absolutely no experience in the topic. Along with a handful of other students, we miraculously managed to put together a flyable aircraft just barely in time for the 2010 competition (the week before finals, too!). Our first competition was - on the whole - an absolutely spectacular experience, with dozens of teams from all over the world showing off a tremendous variety of aircraft, and a general spirit of friendly competition and camaraderie which is absolutely addicting and defines the competition.
Despite a pretty poor overall performance for our first year, we left the 2010 competition infused with energy and creativity that would carry us on to our very successful 2011 competition year. Since our first design was oh-shit-let's-throw-together-something-that-works, we wanted to use our new-found experience to make up for our previous lack of creativity. While search the internet for interesting designs, I came upon Burt Rutan's Proteus... ...and the Terrific Tandem 1.0 was born.
A great recap video of our most-successful-to-date 2011 competition: http://vimeo.com/21629900
A video from one of our post-2011 competition flight tests:
A video from one of our post-2011 competition flight tests: