The SAE Aero Competition: Advanced Team

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Aero Competition is an opportunity for students from around the world to compete in designing and building a remote piloted aircraft capable of meeting specified performance requirements. There are three brackets of the competition, micro, regular, and advanced. This year two senior Mechanical Engineering students (Nick Murdock and Aidan Murphy) are competing in the Advanced bracket for their Mechanical Engineering capstone project. Murdock is focused on the structural engineering aspects of the plane and Murphy is focused on stability and aeronautic systems engineering. The Advanced bracket is focused on designing a gasoline powered plane that can carry the heaviest payload possible while also managing to drop a separate payload from an altitude of at least 100 feet accurately into a target zone. The plane is scored based on how much payload it carries, how accurately it drops payload onto the target zone, and how reliable it is. A formal oral technical presentation and an extensive design report are also scored by a panel of expert judges (drawn from the aerospace and aviation industries) and contribute to the team's overall score. Development of this plane began in September 2017 for the competition hosted in Van Nuys, California in early April 2018. The final design is a single wing taildragger with a wingspan of 96", an overall length of 100", and it is expected to lift a fixed payload of 24 lbs plus a dropable payload of 2 lbs. The plane itself has an empty weight of 9 lbs. Although not available at the time of this writing, results from the competition will be presented at this poster session.