TECHNOLOGY - SCIENCE

Technology - Science

Technology - Science

Introduction

The design process is iterative; you will try many vehicle configurations before selecting the final one. Ideally, you perform iterations before building any hardware. The challenge is to perform the iterations quickly. Typically, different groups work on different steps of the process. Effective collaboration among these groups and the right set of tools are essential to addressing this challenge (Galliers, 2008).

Lightweight Airplane Design

The geometry of this lightweight aircraft is from reference 1. The original design objective for this geometry was a four-seat general aviation aircraft that was safe, simple to fly, and easily maintainable with specific mission and performance constraints. For more details on these constraints. Potential performance requirements for this aircraft include: (Galliers, 2008).

Level cruise speed

Acceptable rate of climb

Acceptable stall speed.

For the aircraft flight control, rate of climb is the design requirement and assumed to be greater than 2 meters per second (m/s) at 2,000 meters.

Figure 1: Lightweight four-seater monoplane.

The aircraft's geometrical configuration determines its aerodynamic characteristics, and therefore its performance and handling qualities. Once you choose the geometric configuration, you can obtain the aerodynamic characteristics by means of: (Marchand, 2009).

Analytical prediction

Wind tunnel testing of the scaled model or a full-sized prototype

Flight tests.

While wind tunnel tests and flight tests provide high-fidelity results, they are expensive and time- consuming, because they must be performed on the actual hardware. It is best to use these methods when the aircraft's geometry is finalized. Note: Analytical prediction is a quicker and less expensive way to estimate aerodynamic characteristics in the early stages of design. In this demo, we will use Digital Datcom, a popular software program, for analytical prediction. The U.S. Air Force developed it as a digital version of its Data Compendium (DATCOM). This software is publicly available (Marchand, 2009).

Digital Datcom provides ...