Electrifying Aviation: Modelling (and procrastinating with) an aircraft in X-Plane 11
Hi readers, I’m Kate and I’m here to catch you up on a semester’s worth of progress for this year’s aviation team! This year our goal has been to design an electric aircraft capable of delivering aid to equatorial nations to compete within the RAeS International Light Aircraft Design Competition. This has been quite a leap for this group of engineering students, with younger students tackling their first engineering group project and our more experienced students trying to pass on wisdom in aircraft design learned from a third-year project that involved transporting tennis balls!
However, despite the large learning curve involved in designing an aircraft the team has been more than happy to tackle things head on! We began in early days by working as a unit to understand the requirements and come up with a vision for our plane StrathLight, and within a few weeks split into 4 sub-teams prepared to tackle any aviation issues! The four teams of Aerodynamics, Power, Structures and Simulation, and Stability and Control are headed by Amy Mitchell, Barbora Zvolska, Sam McKeating and Elyse Millard respectively and these leaders have both taken on the responsibility of passing down their subject specific knowledge and trying to rapidly learn the specifics of designing a light aircraft!
One of the key excitements in semester 1 for us was the opportunity to discuss engineering projects in person again for the first time in over a year! This was facilitated by fortnightly meetings at the university followed by socials with the rest of the society. As restrictions tightened and loosened over the semester it was necessary to move online at points, but this didn’t impair progress with teams utilising zooms and discord channels to muddle through the many challenges of designing an aircraft!
The aero team selected an aerofoil, spar and have even completed preliminary loading calculations to ensure the wing can support selected motors and props. The power team has been hard at work selecting those motors and props, as well as determining the power requirements! As a member of the power sub-team I know first-hand the difficulties of designing appropriate power systems, selecting propellers and calculating parameters from take-off distance to range. Luckily, Barbora’s more electrical background makes her the perfect sub-team lead to balance out my very aero-centric knowledge! Stability has also had quite a journey, with Elyse our resident MATLAB wiz being hard at work passing on her software knowledge as well as deciphering the code from the afore-mentioned tennis ball challenge! Sam has arguably faced one of the biggest challenges this semester in modelling the plane in X-Plane as this is a software with which no-one on the team had much experience with at all prior to beginning the project. Pictured below is our current design which features a 1.2m diameter fuselage, 8m wing span and a 4-propeller configuration, although we’re certain values will be altered as stability dictates!
As we move forward it’s become ever clearer how crucial communication between these sub-teams is, with the occasional standstill being reached as we determine from what team we need information from to proceed with the design! However these issues are being tackled both through the use of a tech log to store all numerical values calculated for design parameters by each team, and through in person design sessions! Pictured below is the team meeting last week in which people could work individually on their required tasks, whilst also being surrounded by others who they could ask for help and pass on information to!
In the coming weeks we hope to finalise the design and start writing up a report detailing our design which hopefully reflects the very exciting prospect of electric aircraft being able to provide life-altering aid in the future! And should this plane not be the best electric light aircraft ever designed, I can guarantee that everyone on this team (particularly myself) will have learned a great deal both about aircraft design and the rewarding nature of working together to tackle big engineering questions!
Thank you very much to all who read this far and should anyone be interested in hearing more about the project or joining the team please reach out to me!
