Bits and Pieces

During the Easter holidays, we had some pieces shaped with a lathe in the workshop at the mechanical engineering department, other pieces were 3D printed in FabLab and then there was one piece we lasered with the same laser cutter we used before for the cargo bay.

This week we assembled some small components of the aircraft, like the wheels for the landing gear. We drilled a hole in the middle parts of the wheels -which were also 3D printed at FabLab- to put the bearings in.

Next we put together the propeller and the spinner and then put it on our AXI Gold motor.

Finally we made a piece to link the front wheel of the landing gear to the cargo bay. As you can see in the first picture, this was the result of the immense man power of the boys in our team :)

Tubtara

Yesterday we paid a visit to our main sponsor, Dejond in Wilrijk. Besides providing us with a nice cup of coffee, they helped us out with some problems we had with connections between the fuselage and the cargo bay. We will be using Tubtaras, which are manufactured in Wilrijk and that are EN9100 certified for aerospace applications. They exist in different shapes and sizes, as can be seen on the picture below. 

Our toys have arrived!

Our orders are arriving in Heverlee! The photos show the package of electronics (batteries, servos, ...). Now that our calculations are almost finished, all we have to do is wait for all the orders to arrive. Sadly enough the foam cutter in FabLab was out of order, but as soon as it's fixed, we can start building our airplane and do a test flight! 

Comparing Airfoils

There were still 2 airfoils we were considering for our wings. Last Friday we cut out both of them to check which one would be easier to produce. It is clear from the picture above that de trailing edge of the right airfoil is a lot better than the left one. Because the trailing edge is really important to generate enough lift, we have selected the right airfoil.

A First Attempt at the Cargo Bay

Last week FabLab was closed, but this week everything was up and running again. After several weeks of cutting foam, we finally decided to cut something else. It's time for a first attempt at the cargo bay! In our design, the cargo bay is cut out of multiplex, but for our first try, we used a lower budget material: MDF wood. FabLab has several laser cutters at our disposal, like the one in the picture above.

The design of our cargo bay hasn't changed much in comparison to the one team KU Leuven used for the Air Cargo Challenge two years back. We've only made it a bit smaller. All the pieces of the cargo bay are cut out of one wooden sheet.

Afterwards the pieces are glued together with super glue. The result can be seen below!

SolidEdge Model

 

Last week, FabLab was closed. So instead of trying out some fun things, we spent the whole week behind our computers, playing around in MatLab and SolidEdge. I strongly doubt a picture of our MatLab code would be interesting. However, the 3D model in Solid Edge looks nice! A lot of things will probably still change, but this is what we have in mind at the moment. This week FabLab is open again, so we can start building stuff again, hooray! We hope to do an attempt at the cargo bay.

Something else we hope to do this week, is place orders for all the materials we will need during production. We have finally found the right sponsors for our project. Take a look here to know who is supporting us!

Tapered and Twisted Wings

This week, we cut out another part of the wing in FabLab. This time, we tried to cut out the right part of our wing. This part is tapered and twisted. In the video above, you can see that we used two separate styrofoam sheets on top of each other. We tested this because eventually we want to make our wings hollow to save some weight. Afterwards we want to glue the upper and lower parts back together. As you can see in the video, Cedric had to press the two styrofoam sheets together a bit, because there was too much space between them.

We also tried to cut out the exact same part of the wing out of one styrofoam sheet. However, our styrofoam sheets were not big enough. Therefore the upper part of the wing was not cut out properly.