My undergraduate career has a strong connection with UVA Aero Design Team - Hoos Flying. It is where I am learning and applying the most of my engineering skills
As a team, we represent University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to compete in SAE Aero Design East Competition Regular Class
ABOUT SAE AERO DESIGN EAST COMPETITION:
SAE Aero design is an International Competition between different Universities from around the world that held annually in March. The competition has a three year design cycles. Most of my undergraduate career was spent on a 2017-2019 design cycle. The competition consists of three main classes: Micro, Regular and Advance Class. We compete in the Regular class.
For the 2017-2019 design cycles, the goal is to design an airplane that is able to carry as many tennis balls (passengers) and steel weights (as cargoes) as possible while conforming to the rules constraint such as electrical power 1 kW limit and 12 ft wing span limit, etc
----------- 2016 - 2017 SCHOOL YEAR ---------
This is my first year at the University without much prior knowledge about airplane in general. I also learnt that the club is just regrouping after two years of inactivity. I, later on, serves as the fuselage lead. We are able to design and build two airplanes with the wingspan of 150 inches and the airplane gross take-off weight of around 30 lbs. We have three test flights and they are all badly crash due to poor design and construction. We are unable to compete at the competition since one of our crashes is at 2 days before competition.
Later on, after the competition, I decided to build an own airplane myself. The airplane dimension was taken from the Japanese airplane Mitsubishi A6M Zero. I only have one month to fully design and fly the airplane. It was deemed a little too heavy to fly. To sum up, as a first year, all of the airplanes I worked on does not have a single successful flight.
Even though it was a fairly rough start, as a first year, I got to learn so much about airplane structures and design. I learnt a lot of lessons the hard way yet all of this knowledge I gain this school year serves as a very strong foundation for the next few years to come.
----------- 2017 - 2018 SCHOOL YEAR ---------
We called this year the Redemption Year. Our goal for the school year was to design an airplane that is capable of going to the competition after the continuous failure from past years. As a result, we took a very conservative design approach in designing this airplane. I am serving as the Chief Engineer of the team. We are able to build two airplanes with the wingspan of 144 inches. The airplane gross takeoff weight of 40 lbs with influenced by the C130. We conducted six test flights and they are all successful flights.
Even though our goal is just able to attend the competition, we ended up performing fairly well with a 5th place overall at the competition and as the 2nd USA Team (only behind Texas A&M).
The video below shows the first ever flight of the HF-18 that year. For me, it is a very memorable moment as it is the first time I have ever seen an RC airplane in the sky and all of the hard work and endurance for the past year and a half are finally paid off.
----------- 2018 - 2019 SCHOOL YEAR ---------
After the unexpected success at last year competition, we decided to attend the last year of the design cycles by designing the airplane that is capable of winning. We aimed to bring a medal back to the University of Virginia. I served the team as the co-president with focus towards technical engineering design.
We realized that our plane is clearly overbuilt last year due to a conservative designing method. We tested fly HF-18 to its maximum capacity. This resulted in a severe plane crash into the trees. However, the plane is mainly in one piece and not fracture which, again, clearly indicates that the airplane was over-design. As a result, several engineering methods are used such as experiment set up and finite element analysis (FEA) to make the airplane better and lighter while further increases the airplane capabilities. The pictures below show several experiments set up among different component teams (fuselage, wing, tail, landing gear and propulsion)
All of these experiments help us to design a very well-performed airplane with capacity of 50 tennis balls and lift off gross weight of 50 lbs. The airplane was proven worthy at the competition. On the first flight round, there are roughly 30 to 40 mph crosswind on the airplane mostly design to fly around 20 mph. The majority of the teams were unable to fly. They are either decided to not fly or crashed the airplane during the process. UVA Aero Design was the only team that is able to take off and landed with almost full airplane capacity. It was a joyful and victorious moment. The video below shows the airplane journey overcoming the crosswind.
Continue the first flight success, we are able to complete 4 more flight rounds, earning the 3rd place in Mission Performance and 3rd Place Overall at the competition as the 1st USA Team.
----------- 2019 - 2020 SCHOOL YEAR ---------
- To be updated -