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This weekend, 11 senior mechanical engineering students will be soaring into competition on the wings of a radio-controlled aircraft they built as part of their senior capstone project.
The AERO Design East competition runs Friday, May 4 – Sunday, May 6 in Forth Worth, Texas. The contest challenges students to conceive, design, fabricate, and test a fully functional radio-controlled aircraft that can take off and land while carrying the maximum payload.
This year’s team is comprised of Tito Anyanwu (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Jill Bisplinghoff (Rye, N.H.), Alex Chatfield (Lebanon, N.J.), Marquis Scholar Tim Creelman (Philadelphia, Pa.), Aaron Hilber (Appleton, Wis.), Mike Leff (Bedford, N.Y.), Steve Music (San Jose, Costa Rica), Mateen Poonawala (Karachi, Pakistan), who is also a mathematics-economics major, Daniel Sharp (Monroe, N.Y.), Bryan Shive (Bethlehem, Pa.), and Andrew Zarenski (Rocky Hill, Conn.).
Students spend the first three years of their education progressing toward this type of project, which provides the opportunity to apply the knowledge learned in the classroom on a practical level.
“This project takes a lot of dedication. You use most of your spare time because we have to adhere to very strict deadlines,” says Zarenski. “Though, we are able to work with new tools and software and perform a lot of experimentation. This is the kind of real world experience that companies in the workforce are looking for.”
There are 73 schools registered for this year’s competition, which generally attracts dozens of the top engineering schools in the country. Lafayette has traditionally more than held its own, and Louis Hayden, visiting part-time professor of mechanical engineering and team adviser, expects no less this year. Lafayette finished eighth overall last year and third in the oral design presentation category while competing against 43 schools.
“We’ve progressively gotten better and more competitive because we’ve got some very intelligent young people and the kids are doing a wonderful job,” Hayden says.
The competition is broken into three parts. The first is a written design report on the aircraft that is limited to 30 pages and must be done according to the rules and regulations of the competition. The second part is an oral presentation, where team members put forth their design report. Professional aerospace engineers from Martin Marietta Corp. evaluate the designs.
“They’re very thorough,” Hayden says of the three-member panel of engineers. “It’s a neat experience for the kids to go through. They write a full-blown design report and try to convince the engineers why their design is best, and also predict how much weight the airplane is going to lift.”
Finally, the students in Lafayette’s “Wingmen +1” team must actually get their plane in the air.
There’s a 200-foot takeoff run and a 400-foot landing space for the planes. Lafayette’s entry is expected to be about 1,000 square inches with a 79-inch wingspan and about 50 to 55 inches long. It weighs nine pounds and hopes to be able to carry about a 15- or 16-pound payload.
Throughout the school year, the students have had to figure out the design, what type of air foil will be used, all the various parameters for the design, and what materials will be utilized. In short, it takes all the experience the 11 students have gained so far in their education to make the airplane take off and perform up to maximum standards.
“On top of engineering abilities, we learn presentation, problem solving, teamwork, and analytical skills,” says Sharp. “There is always some sort of challenge that comes up.”
The project also becomes more than just a class for the students.
“This is the most enthusiastic I have been about a class,” says Hilber. “Everyone is very passionate about the project and we all want to do well at the competition.”
“One of the biggest experiences they derive from this is they learn to work on a design team. They work in a project environment as though they were working at a major engineering company and not at a college,” Hayden says. “That fact is, they’re taking all their coursework and applying what they’ve learned to this project.”