So I made another aircraft! This time around, the focus was on creating an aircraft that able to lift up to 150lbs with a constant TAS of 85m/s. Additionally, I wanted to ensure that it is something everyone, anyone and whoever can use for studying specific fluid mechanics and physical phenomenon related to lift, stress v.s strain curves, be rapidly deployable and use novel 3D structures for lightweighting and strength.
The result:
The colors are for distinctive materials and construction assemblies, sort of an annotation in 3D itself. The aircraft went through about 3 basic design iterations, before v0.3 was put into CFD software. After this, certain minor changes were made, to bring it to a whole number designation of v1.0. This aircraft iteration was again analyzed using CFD, but this time, the data was directly used to create models for static analysis using nTopology. Additional changes were made, and before I knew it, I was onto the next whole number iteration, v2.0. The model you see above is – Wheee v.2.5.
Obviously, please ignore my naming, as it is a combination of a child and a troll in one. Either way, v2.0 was probably the most “meta” of all the revision phases, as it included net-net solving and optimization for battery power v.s wing geometry, battery v.s lift and other similar optimizations to fully optimize the craft’s performance. Additionally, versions Wheee v2.5-P1 and Wheee v2.5-P2 are in the works, these include modifications and additional nuances for a single and twin prop setup, greatly increase heavy lift capabilities.
There obviously is quite a bit of math, largely python and hand solved that I used for this, but I used a few new methods, including linear algebra and Partial Differential Equations, giving me somewhat of a granular understanding of the behavior of the platform. Additionally, I used vector fields and Monte Carlo simulations to find the best possible approach to constructing this aircraft and not have it be an extremely overpriced lawn-dart. (for health and safety reasons and for legal purposes, I would like to emphasize that lawn darts with entertainment/comedy or aerospace aspirations are dangerous, so are children.)
For the next 6 weeks, I hope to cover each design phase, tool and technique used in the process, while also making notes and texts to help you out in creating your next heavy-lift aircraft.
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