Week 1: Takeoff!!
Inika B -
Welcome back everyone to week 1 of my senior project! Now that my project has officially taken off it’s time to dive straight into what I’ll be doing this week and the next. As I have covered before, my ultimate goal is to be able to design an electric aircraft that would seat 4 people and see how it compares to conventional aircraft that completes the same functions.
Starting off, I’ll be collecting and entering data of other single engine, monoplane, 4 place aircraft into excel so that eventually I can use the data I’ve collected to caculate the averages of important aspects of these aircraft. Some data that I will be collecting would be the empty weight, gross weight, and wing area to name a few. Now, I know that I’ve just thrown like 50 new words at you- most of these definitions simply define features of a plane. Monoplane means that the aircraft has 1 wing configuration, with a wing on either side of the plane and 4 place simply means that the aircraft can carry 4 humans. For the aspects, empty weight is the lightest the plane can weigh when flying (basically when it’s completely empty) and gross weight is the maximum amount of weight the aircraft can safely carry without becoming dangerous to fly. Finally, wing area is simply the total surface area of an aircraft’s wings.
I hope those definitions were helpful in understanding what I was talking about. Now, I know it might seem a little confusing on why I’m doing this step, but before I can jump into the fun part (actually drawing my design- yay!!) I have to make sure all the technical aspects fall into place. Designing an airplane is really just managing a bunch of tradeoffs- a faster plane needs a lighter body, so you’d have to lower your weight leading to sacrifices like how many people it can hold and the amount of fuel….. yeah you get it. It’s crucial to understand this before jumping right into drawing a plane so you have some understanding of what you’d like your plane to look like. Now, we all know the phrase “work smarter not harder” and so instead of taking the long way and doing a bunch of unnecessary math, I decided to simply take a bunch of planes that have already been designed beforehand that have been built for similar reasons, average the details out, then use what I find as a frame to work off when designing my plane!
So thats about the end of my update- next week I’ll hopefully have pictures of some initial plane designs to share with you all!