Status Update: Standard Dynamics Model
Members: Lawrence, Snead, Wignall
31Jan2011
Since our last report, our team has made significant progress in all phases of our project. Overall, we have been able to accurately model the fuselage, wings, horizontal/vertical stabilizers, ventral fins, strakes, cockpit, and intake. The model will be constructed completely of aluminum and will use standard fasteners to hold the various components together. At this stage, the location, size, and orientation of the fasteners are still in the design phase, with careful consideration being given to force tolerance and flow obstruction. Most likely, we will use standard #6 hexagonal cap screws for the wings, and slightly smaller screws for the rest of the pieces. Our desire is for the flight surfaces to remain detachable to facilitate future flight configurations for dynamic flight testing.
The model will be mounted to a sting device constructed of 13.5” aluminum bar stock. Ideally we would like to use a circular cross section, but further force analysis is required before making a final decision. Our goal is to gun drill the center of the bar stock to create a mount for our balance and a wire guide for the strain gauges. The main concern is leaving enough material around the mounting surface to achieve a desirable force tolerance near the pitch crescent used to mount the model in the tunnel. The balance will mount inside the sting using a machined keyway to prevent rolling and set screws for fore/aft security.
Our immediate goals are to create engineering drawings for the ODU machine shop to inspect and accept. Once our model is in the build queue, our main focus will shift to designing the data acquisition software (DAS) using LabView. Our team has been able to become familiar with the LabView software through a series of tutorials, but little significant progress has been made towards designing a data collection system specific to our project. The complexity of the DAS will rely strongly on the amount of time we are able to allot towards building it. Initially we aim to design a system to collect and organize raw data that we can interpret ourselves. We would like to be able to obtain data early and address any design issues rather than devote a lot of time to the software. If able, we will return to the design of the system later in order to add more functionality and better user interface.