My Senior Project (not that kind Gramps)

ejclide · Post by **ejclide** » Thu Apr 04, 2013 11:00 pm

So today I wrapped up my last exam before finals on the 22nd. Things are starting to wind down a little, and I thought I would share a little about my senior project for those interested.

My team competed in the SAE Aero Design competition East down in Fort Worth in March. Basically, we have been designing and building an aircraft since last August with the specific intention of minimizing the empty weight of the aircraft while maximizing it's payload capacity.

We competed in the Micro Class division. The plane and everything needed to fly it have to fit in a box 24x18x8 inches. Our plane empty weighed about .37 pounds, and we flew with a maximum payload of 1.39 pounds. There are a bunch of factors that go into the flight score, but basically the score is dependent on those two weights and the plane flying a circuit successfully.

The Crossbow looking thing was a 100% custom made launcher for the aircraft. This gave us a very large advantage over other teams trying to hand launch their planes as we could achieve a very good launch speed.

And the good luck touch we added before the competition. You can see that in front of the tail was all repaired, but we never damaged the tail.

In the end we placed 5th out of 23 teams. Lost to Georgia Tech, a team from Brazil, UC, and Toronto (Toronto snuck up on their last flight to steal 4th from us). Our last flight of the competition with the 1.39 pound payload would have put us in second place, but on the landing a small piece of the fuselage broke off, and the rules dictate the plane has to remain 100% intact. So despite flying with the MOST weight we'd ever carried, we did not get credit for the flight.

All in all, we had a blast. I was predominately involved in building the fuselages and selecting our airfoil/chord length. Building the fuse involved a lot of load testing and material strength vs. weight testing. It is very relieving having finished with the competition in March. Most other senior design groups are still finishing up their projects while we get to spend the next few weeks winding down and finishing up with the rest of our classes.

The best part though? Three weeks from Sunday and I will be a legitimate mechanical engineer, and in June I start my job with a company manufacturing interiors. I'm pumped to get started with the rest of my life.

Thanks for reading folks, and I hope to see as many of you as possible in Dayton on May 4th!

BigMac · Post by **BigMac** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 1:43 am

Wouldn't it have been lighter to use a rubber band with the propeller?

Just kidding! Congratulations, and good luck with your career!

ejclide · Post by **ejclide** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 1:45 am

Haha, it's actually pretty amazing what a small motor and small 3cell battery can do!

Midnight_Rider · Post by **Midnight_Rider** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 1:47 am

Brains always impress me- consider me impressed.

ejclide · Post by **ejclide** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 1:53 am

Midnight_Rider wrote:Brains always impress me- consider me impressed.

How does this statement apply to zombies and the eating of brains?

Midnight_Rider · Post by **Midnight_Rider** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 1:55 am

I was referring to thinking with them, not eating them.

ducktapetg · Post by **ducktapetg** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 9:49 am

Congrats!

I know my schools team likes to crash their plane prior to the event although I am not sure how they did (doing?) this year.

Quick question, does your school have Formula SAE? If so, why didn't you do that?

r/tguy02 · Post by **r/tguy02** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 11:24 am

congrats! neat project

ejclide · Post by **ejclide** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 12:06 pm

ducktapetg wrote:Congrats!

I know my schools team likes to crash their plane prior to the event although I am not sure how they did (doing?) this year.

Quick question, does your school have Formula SAE? If so, why didn't you do that?

One of the biggest reasons our professor only lets us do Micro class now is that it's much easier to build multiple planes and repairs are much quicker. We could rebuild the plane in about an hour from the tail forward. We liked crashing too, but we made sure to fly it A LOT before the competition so that by then we wouldn't be crashing. And it worked! What school do you go to? I don't remember a NH team on the roster, but then again we spent the whole weekend in the top 5.

Regarding Formula SAE. If Wright State had it, I would have done it. There isn't a professor willing to supervise, there isn't enough funding for it, and there's no ROOM for it lol. Plus, I wanted to work with this specific professor so my choices were Aero design or an AFRL project with a 20k budget to build a bridge... Didn't want to do that one

ducktapetg · Post by **ducktapetg** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 12:13 pm

I agree with you then. Our schools FSAE budget is tiny with very little support from the professors. They are more into theoretical crap than designing something. We rely heavily on sponsors. The senior projects are a great learning platform though. I think I learned more from that project than the whole undergraduate program.

ejclide · Post by **ejclide** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 12:28 pm

I learned more practical things from my internship than school lol

r/tguy02 · Post by **r/tguy02** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 1:23 pm

^truth, never learn more than what you do on the job

rOniN · Post by **rOniN** » Fri Apr 05, 2013 4:03 pm

Looks like a fun project, we did something similar when I was at Purdue. I just did a small part of the electrical system for the fly-by-wire system.

Fun part would have been to design a helicopter. Now that's magic. I fly something that weighs up to 77,000 lbs and it handles like a Huey.

What type of interiors are you going to be doing?

ragek23 · Post by **ragek23** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 12:17 am

ejclide wrote:I learned more practical things from my internship than school lol

So freakin true^ I am working at a power utility where I did my paid internships. I had no prior experience with power systems only power electronics. When I took teh power systems courses the next year I was practically teaching the classes.

Thats awesome man! It takes real dedication to be doing that and completing your degree. I helped out with the Formula SAE team at my school (RIT) but, they expected you to spend almost every waking hour machining or making carbon fiber parts and if you weren't a Mechy student they treated you like a wheel chuck. In they end they made a really cool car tho. This was the end result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVzR9z9bFMI

A majort thumbs up to you in starting your career in this very difficult job climate. The world is at your finger tips my friend!

ejclide · Post by **ejclide** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 1:04 am

ragek23 wrote:
ejclide wrote:I learned more practical things from my internship than school lol
So freakin true^ I am working at a power utility where I did my paid internships. I had no prior experience with power systems only power electronics. When I took teh power systems courses the next year I was practically teaching the classes.

Thats awesome man! It takes real dedication to be doing that and completing your degree. I helped out with the Formula SAE team at my school (RIT) but, they expected you to spend almost every waking hour machining or making carbon fiber parts and if you weren't a Mechy student they treated you like a wheel chuck. In they end they made a really cool car tho. This was the end result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVzR9z9bFMI

A majort thumbs up to you in starting your career in this very difficult job climate. The world is at your finger tips my friend!

What I noticed, at my school anyway, was a horrible lack of emphasis on manufacturing information. I learned more about manufacturing this last semester in my machining TECH ELECTIVE than I have in all other classes combined. And for that matter, I wouldn't be near where I am now without the internship. Fortunately I'm going back to work with the company I interned with.

RIT was actually one of the schools I looked at. In some ways I wish I had gone there (I liked the school, A LOT), but staying in state was just more financially reasonable, and Wright State still has a very well regarded ME program.

I'm very excited to start working full time, and I am fully aware how grateful I should be that I'm walking into a job after school (didn't even really have to interview, although working for the company for 9 months is kind of an interview). Two of my group members still haven't gotten any good bites.

rOniN wrote:What type of interiors are you going to be doing?

The company I'm working for does a lot of stuff for GM (my internship was on the Chevy Trax program), some Mercedes, International/Kenworth, and even the Tesla S. Most of it is just Instrument Panels (i.e. the dashboards), but some programs are larger and many more components of the interiors. There is one program that is going through prototyping right now, and while I don't think I can say much about it, we're doing most of the interior panels/consoles.

haseebgill12 · Post by **haseebgill12** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 1:41 pm

Hey man this is fantastic.

Its great to see fellow Mech engers, thought I was only one of a couple on 2gn. I'm an undergraduate here in the UK studying MEng Mechanical & Electrical Engineering (yes I literally do about 75% of each degree). I currently have a scholarship with the Iberdrola group and have had experience working with Rolls Royce last year. It was interesting you guys were talking about Formula SAE, as I was also part of Formula Student last year!
I also have to say that so far my course has been highly theoretical with not much practical experience. The guys doing solely Mech Eng get to do lots of cool stuff like "strip and build" (it is exactly what it sounds like), while we are sitting in labs messing around with VHDL, Modelsim, Xilinx, logic gates, FPGAs, oscillators and loads of other electrical crap

.

How cool would it be if we had an "engineers thread" where we could discuss possible improvements for the Neon (r/t, srt4... whatever) from an engineers perspective.

How did you find your degree as a whole?

ragek23 · Post by **ragek23** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 6:32 pm

I actually got a BS in Electrical Eng. Tech. from RIT. I was originally in Comp. Eng. Tech. but I didn't like the idea of programing for the rest of my life. At RIT in EET you have one lab for every EET class you take. They try and make it directly related to the industry. On top of that they require 5 paid 3month internships or 4 if you have a job offer your last year. In EET vs. EE you were much more hands on and less theoretical. Also the big benefit for me was that EET offered a power system minor while EE didn't offer any classes bassed on power systems. I felt that RIT made you very well rounded in engineering overall. I even got to take a mechy elective about vibrations and noise which mostly covered suspension systems.

Its freaking funny you metnion VHD, Xilinx etc. because most of my CET classes involved that.

Good luck with your degree! keep on it and you will succeed!

ejclide · Post by **ejclide** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 8:16 pm

My degree seemed to be mostly theoretical. There are some labs involved with our vibrations class, a senior level metals lab, circuits, experimental measurements, etc. But I think it's more of a "get out of it what you put in" program. The professors are great, but there are no requirements for internships or co-ops (one thing I really liked about RIT). However, I am glad I took the initiative to find a paid internship (paid quite well too). I made more as an intern than my wife does now as a teacher...

Three weeks from today I will be partying in preparation for graduation the next day!

theColonel · Post by **theColonel** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 8:51 pm

ejclide wrote: Three weeks from today I will be partying in preparation for graduation the next day!

Congratulations

ducktapetg · Post by **ducktapetg** » Sat Apr 06, 2013 10:11 pm

ejclide wrote:My degree seemed to be mostly theoretical. There are some labs involved with our vibrations class, a senior level metals lab, circuits, experimental measurements, etc. But I think it's more of a "get out of it what you put in" program. The professors are great, but there are no requirements for internships or co-ops (one thing I really liked about RIT). However, I am glad I took the initiative to find a paid internship (paid quite well too). I made more as an intern than my wife does now as a teacher...

I completely agree. The only "real" world experience from school was the senior project and the manufacturing class (yes one class). The rest just provides you with the ability to problem solve. College is definitely an experience I will never forget and I will never regret, especially since I paid off 90% off my loans in the first couple of years working. Can't say that for most majors.

Anyways, like said above, work hard and there will be no limits to your success.

ragek23 · Post by **ragek23** » Sun Apr 07, 2013 12:46 am

theColonel wrote:
ejclide wrote: Three weeks from today I will be partying in preparation for graduation the next day!
Congratulations

ducktapetg wrote:College is definitely an experience I will never forget and I will never regret, especially since I paid off 90% off my loans in the first couple of years working. Can't say that for most majors.

Anyways, like said above, work hard and there will be no limits to your success.

Well said.
I am about 50% paid off right now. Most of my school was paid through loans so its a huge dent but your right, most of my friends arn't as fortunate to get though the debt snow ball as quickly.