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Last April, a nine-member team of Lafayette mechanical engineering majors deftly landed in first place for oral design presentation in the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) annual Aero Design East competition.
This year, a 13-member team hopes to repeat that performance during the competition, to be held April 21-23 in Marietta, Ga. In addition, the nine seniors and four juniors hope to rise above last year’s eighth-place overall competition standing and score high on their design report.
“The purpose of the project is for them to take the engineering skills that they’ve learned through their first three years and apply those to a real-life engineering problem,” says Louis Hayden, visiting part-time instructor of mechanical engineering, who serves as the team’s adviser. “I’m hoping for big things this year. We’ve got a really good group of students, and they’re highly motivated.”
Serving as project manager for the team is Marquis Scholar Jennifer Gibson ’06 (Blairsville, Pa.) who says this year’s group chose to keep things simple, choosing what she calls “Hershey bar wings” over last year’s delta wing design.
“There’s nothing fancy about it,” she says, explaining that the simpler design should enable the plane to lift a heavier payload – and each pound a plane lifts earns it four points in the competition. ”We decided to go with what works.”
David Clements ’06 (Merion Station, Pa.), who has done much of the motor and propulsion work, adds that team members quickly learned that manufacturing a design is harder than it seems.
“We’re putting together a fuselage piece by piece,” he says, explaining that the body, which must be between 94 and 95 inches long, is composed of 4- and 5- inch pieces of balsa wood. “We’re all good at the computer and math end. It took a little while to get acquainted with working with our hands.”
Gibson says that although the team initially divided itself into four groups to handle propulsion, structure and analysis, payload, and aerodynamics, members soon began overlapping into other areas, and now work on each phase as their time and skill allow. “For the most part, everybody just bounces around among the groups. It seems to be working very well.”
Joining Gibson and Clements on the team are seniors Adam Bozick (Uniontown, Pa.), Brian Forsberg (Baldwin, N.Y.), Rachel Jacobs (Milford, Pa.), Mike Lefante (Sparta, N.J.), Andrew Morley (New Canaan, Conn.), Joseph Nimphius (Mamaroneck, N.Y.), and Jill Saporetti (Woodbury Heights, N.J.), whose work is part of their senior mechanical engineering design “capstone” course. Assisting the seniors are juniors Bryan Shive (Bethlehem, Pa.), Mike Leff (Bedford, N.Y.), Brian Finkelstein (Mendham, N.J.), and Aaron Hilber (Appleton, Wis.).
The team, named Acopian Aviation, after the engineering building where members spend much of their time, formed at the end of last year’s spring semester.
“We came into this project with virtually no practical experience,” Gibson says, explaining that team members have learned a great deal about the fine points of aviation—and the fine art of keeping their design simple.
“Our original design had details that once we got to the construction phase we realized would be much more difficult than we thought,” she says. “Everybody has ideas of grandeur.”
Gibson says that while the juniors on the team were able to handle much of the Autodesk Inventor and MathCAD computer work during the design phase, another program, designed to simulate a wind tunnel for testing, is giving the team a bit more trouble.
“We’re still working out the bugs,” she says.
Gibson and Clements agree that despite the challenges they’ve faced, they’re optimistic about their chances of finishing well in the competition—and they’re pleased with their progress.
“This is the first time I’ve been able to see a project go through the entire process, from start to finish,” says Gibson, who worked on parts of projects last summer as an intern at Lutron Co. in Coopersburg, Pa. “It’s so nice to see it come to fruition. And it’s just so refreshing to actually do something real.”
On campus, Gibson is the campus resident advisers’ liaison to Lafayette’s residential life staff, a member of the Alpha Phi sorority, vice president of the student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a member of the student chapter of SAE. She spent her sophomore January interim semester studying architecture in Belgium.
Clements, who interned last summer at Synthes, a biomedical device company in Paoli, Pa., is a member of the student chapters of ASME and SAE.