Engineering Program Investigation

College/University of interest: I haven't looked seriously at colleges yet, but so far I would definitely love to go to a UC or tech school, perhaps UC Davis or Cal Poly. I know UC Davis has a great engineering program, and I also know that Cal Poly has a good aerospace engineering program, which is the field that I want to get into.

Why does this institution appeal to you?: It appeals to me because the UC and tech schools are very prestigious and are great schools. Also, most of them have great engineering programs.

Which engineering program is most interesting to you and why?: Definitely aerospace engineering. Even as a little kid I was interested in airplanes and spaceships, and as a kid I wondered how they work and what makes them do what they do.

Which undergraduate engineering elective is most interesting? Describe the course and its appeal to you: The engineering elective, again, would have to be aerospace engineering. Like I said earlier, it interests me the most. I would love to take one or more engineering courses in college. In an aerospace engineering class, their goal is to educate the students about aerospace engineering with a written aspect and a hands on aspect. Here is a link to the aerospace engineering course description at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo: http://aero.calpoly.edu/about/

I would love to go into the subfield of aerospace engineering listed on the website linked above called aircraft and spacecraft design.

Glider Challenge: Design Phase

1. Our final design is the white and blue hanglider second from the far left.

2. 1) What's the challenge? The challenge is to build an efficient glider given the materials of some balsa wood, glue, and tissue paper.

2) Brainstorm solutions:
-What are the rules of brainstorming? (oxymoron) I'd say there are no rules to brainstorming; the only thing that would even come close to being a rule would be "nothing rediculous", but that would defeat the purpose of brainstorming, as brainstorming is listing anything and everything that comes to mind when confronting a problem.
-List your ideas Hanglider, stealth bomber design, airplane design
-Sketch at least two of them

3) Specify:
-Criteria Has to be able to fly, has to have wings, should be designed to achieve the most hangtime and distance, should be somewhat accurate
-Constraints (be specific about materials available) Only given a few materials, I don't know the exact amount of materials, but I could guess that we got about 3-4 square feet of tissue paper, and maybe a total of 1.5 meters of balsa wood, weight, must be hand thrown

4) Develop Solutions:
-Sketch (with labels)

Bonus) Prototype with Paper
We made a prototype with the yellow plastic arms from the robo kits (picture of the prototype is included in my previous glider blog post).

3. As far as results go, our glider did pretty well despite our terrible and fatal test runs. We finished 3rd in distance and 1st in hangtime. If we did this again, I think we would defnitely change the wing size, as the stregnth of the balsa wood was not enough to support the massive wing size, and other groups with more of an airplane approach with smaller, more rigid wings seemed to work better than ours.
Worked with Ryan.

Glider Challenge

Before you're ready to "compete" with your glider, you probably want to try your design out and see how it goes. Use this format for collecting notes.

What did you learn from your test flight?We learned that our wings were too big and that the balsa wood frame was not as sturdy as we thought, and not nearly sturdy enough to support the size of the wings.

What are your goals for your glider and how will you adjust your design in order to help it better meet them?
We will try to fix the glider, but I'm not sure that it will work seeing as almost the whole frame is broken in several places. Definitely going to be a hard fix if it's even possible.

Here is an extensive gallery of pictures that were taken during the construction of our project:

:

We just tested our gliders today (April 8). Turns out, we actually did pretty well, we got first place in hangtime and third place in distance, which of course is much higher than I had ever imagined for our design, given how much it failed when we tested it last time. 

Worked with Ryan.