Overview

Designed an airplane to fly around a race course with the heaviest possible payload in the shortest amoung of time by optimizing design parameters for the Unified Design Competition. Wrote a program to optimize several different design variables pertaining to the geometry of the wings and other control surfaces. Suitable taper, washout, and dihedral values for the wing were chosen as well as a proper angle of attachment to the fuselage. Designed aircraft configuration around suitable stability and control parameters such as static margin and spiral stability.

Our plane performed much much better than predicted. Our time of revolution was much faster than calculated, for both the empty case and the payload case, and the payload we could carry was nearly double that which we expected. Huge thank you to my teammates Haley Bates, Matthew Luerman, and Alan Osmundson!

Final project for Unified Engineering (16.003 Fluid Dynamics + 16.004 Thermodynamics).

Files for this project are not available.

Here are more images from our design, build, and flight process.

Fuselage

Completed airplane