TITAN Aircraft

This project consists in a functional airplane with its main purpose being to compete in the SAE Aero Design event, in the Advanced class specifically. As the rules establish, the aircraft is fully electric, and its propulsion comes from a single propeller. The motor is also restricted to a maximum of 750 W and the competition consists in three main challenges. It needs to be able to transport three different types of cargo; plastic water bottles, Nerf Vortex balls and static payload, for which we use steel. But for the second challenge, the bottles and the Nerf must be released mid-flight and land without any damage. The most prone to break are the bottles, so we use parachutes for a soft landing. And for the third challenge, the main aircraft must transport gliders that contain ping pong balls, and this must be controlled by auto pilot in order to reach an established target. All the project is designed and built by students, with the goal to have the lighter aircraft possible but with the necessary stiffness to resist all the stages of the flight and more than one flights. That is the idea in mind while the design process is taking place, starting with the wings and the empennage, analyzing the aerodynamic performance of its near four meters wingspan and its structural needs, followed by the fuselage, considering all the volume required and its strength to support the loads existent through the flight, and finally the landing gears, which need to allow the plane to move in the ground and endure the impacts from the landings. To achieve that relation between load capacity and total empty weight, a lot of fluid analysis are performed, but also the material selection is a crucial factor, that is why balsa wood it´s mainly used, but for some critical areas another type of wood is implemented such as plywood, and even some pieces are made of aluminum, such as the spar and the landing gears. This airplane has an empty weight of seventeen pounds, with a maximum takeoff weight of forty pound, the capacity to storage twelve Nerfs and one hundred and thirty-five ounces of water, while carrying three glider that transport a total of sixty three colonizers each round. And although this airplane is intended for that specific competition, it can be the basis for various conditioning towards other applications, such as field irrigation, surveillance, etc.