RC Plane
- Objective: for my engineering design class at UCLA, my team was tasked on creating a RC plane that could hold 2 pounds of weight and then drop the weight while in flight.
- Plane Design: our plane will be made out of extruded polystyrene foam due to its light weight and rigidness. Because our plane needs to carry a lot of weight, our team needed to chose an airfoil that had a very high lift coefficient. Since speed was not important for our objective, the drag coefficient was not as important. We ended up choosing the GOE226 airfoil due to its high lift coefficient. Our rudders, elevators, and ailerons were connected to the plane with hinges and controlled using servo motors. Due to the payload, our plane needed a powerful motor. While I'm not sure about the exact motor we used, our motor was definetely more powerful and bigger than the other teams. Additionally, we specifically chose our propeller to provide us with the most lift. Lastly, our sizing of the plane was done using calculations on MATLAB.
- Payload Design: our payload drop mechanism is a 3D printed container with two servos on the bottom. This container will be in the fuselage of our plane and the servos will turn downward to release the weight.
- Manufacturing: to cut the foam for our plane we used a heated wire to make precise cuts. To help smooth our plane to make it more aerodynamics, we used sandpaper on certain areas to give the foam a more round shape. This will allow air to flow around the control surface much easier. Our plane was put together with hot glue. We wanted our control surface servos to be flush with the plane surfaces, so we used a box cutter to help make holes in our plane where the servos will be glued. To mount our wings onto the plane, our team used rubber bands and dowels. This made it so that the plane could be transported easier and easily could be taken apart. Our motor mount was 3D printed and attached to the plane using hot glue. To attach our motor to the motor mount, heat set inserts were placed into the mount so that the motor could be screwed in. Lastly, we found out that all our payload weights couldnt fit into one container, so we created 2 and had to equally space them from the center of gravity of our plane. This made it so that when the weights are dropped, the plane stability would not be affected. Finally, we moved components around so that the center of weight would be between the leading edge and trailing edge of our wings.
- Testing: from the video below, our plane unfortunately crashed on its first flight and we were unfortunately not able to test the drop mechanism of our plane. However, the fact that it was able to get into the air was very impressive, knowing that it had to hold 2 extra pounds of weight.
- Improvements: one improvement would be to be more precise when when cutting our foam so that assembling the plane would be easier. Also, our payload drop mechanism allowed for the weight to easily slip past the servos; so, in the future, I hope to make the payload mechanism fully closed at the bottom.
