Airfoil Shape - Wind tunnel - Improve "Right flyer"
Design brief:
In this project, the object is to analyse and build a replacement for the wing design of the original “Right flyer” airplane and to improve its flight performance. By using the given materials, we need to both decide what airfoil shape that we are going to use and build a 1/5th model of the full scale wing design and test its lift to drag ratio using the wind tunnel. After proving our theory about the new airfoil, we are going to design and build the new wings that are going to be assembled to the fuselage. After that, the flight performance is going to be tested and adjusted to reach the best ability of the new-designed wing.
Testing results:
At the beginning of my test, the plane didn’t takeoff, at all. And there was some structural problem with the assembly. After a few more CFD and actual testing proving my theory, I did few changes to the plane: I changed the way I put on the rubber bands and which gave me much more force that it became reasonable for the plane to reach its takeoff speed of around 2.5m/s. And I have put a few wooden sticks to reinforce the structural, so that everything can keep in lines and stop falling off. After that, the plane finally took off pretty successfully, I would say. And it finally reached my expectation of the design (the custom airplane should have a lift to drag ratio of 12). And the takeoff distance is measured as 0.5m.
The airfoil I chose for this project is AH-7-47-6 AIRFOIL (ah7476-il), it has a performances great at low reynolds numbers.
To reduce the effect of the vortex drag, a strake-wing layout has been involved into the design. It shows its effectiveness in the computational model. And it actually works.
It is so cool to see something that I designed actually works! Thanks, I have gained a lot from this project!