Introduction
My final goal in this project was to get my glider to glide for at least 50 feet and have pitch stability and directional stability. One glider concept I knew I needed was more lift than weight. I did this by not adding too much nose mass and having a large wing area. Another concept was having more thrust than drag. I did this by sanding my wings and horizontal stabilizer to the best airfoil shape that would give them the most thrust. Gliders generally work by either being thrown, pushed off something, or launched. They then glide too wherever they are supposed to. There are no power plants. One constraint I had was it was going to be a normal style glider. Also another constraint is none of the parts had any taper or leading edge. This made it easier for me to cut out the pieces. Two final constraints are it wasn’t a dihedral and had the wings on top of the fuselage. The first part in the design process was getting used to Aery. Then we had to do the two challenge problems with Aery and fix them. Then we had to create our own glider using the correct configurations. Printed the plans. Then we created a proposal. And finally, we built our gliders.
![Picture](/uploads/1/1/7/6/117626016/p72_orig.png)
These are the configurations we needed to have to construct our glider on Aery so it would work with the balsa and bass wood.
This is an image of my glider I constructed on Aery showing the main tab.
These are the plans I used to construct my glider. They show the dimensions of my glider.
This is a picture of me with my finished glider.
This is a picture of me constructing the glider. I am putting the vertical tail and horizontal stabilizer on the fuselage.
This is a picture of my recording form with all my competition data.
Summary
I never got to do any official tests because my glider broke before I could and we were running out of time. But my glider did pretty good. It got to 50 feet a couple times but mostly stayed in the 40-50 feet range. I was able to follow the plans very well. Using page 4 of the plans made it very easy for me to construct my glider. My glider flew for a couple seconds. It would go straight until around 35 feet and then the lift would start to decrease. Sometimes it would go longer and sometimes shorter. I think this is because I didn’t pull hard enough on the launcher when I was launching my glider so it didn’t glide for very long. One thing that could of made my flight more successful is adding clay to the right side of my wing. It seemed that my glider would lean to the left a little bit every time I launched it. I was going to add clay to the right wing, but when I finally did it my next attempt I broke my glider on accident. Personally I think I incorporated the design process very well. I followed all the directions leading up to making my glider. I made sure I had the correct configurations and always looked if there were ways to improve my glider. I also went into a lot of detail in my proposal. The only thing I messed up in my design process was when I broke my stabilizer while sanding it down. Luckily I was allowed to cut out a new one. That was my only mishap during the whole project. Overall this was one of my favorite projects in all of my engineering classes I’ve had.
Conclusion Questions
1) One strength of a competitive trial is you can see first hand if the design is optimal. Also you can make changes to it as you are testing it. Like dding weight or flaps. Weaknesses of this are there could be other factors that could be make the trial incorrect, Also you could do a wrong cut and mess up the whole glider without even knowing.
2) One difference was my horizontal stabilizer was not too long. It would say my plane would fly, but that the stabilizer may be too long. This was not the case during testing because my glider seemed it needed more lift. another difference was my glider didn't need 11 grams of nose mass for it to fly. It only needed around 1/2 of that.
3) The most optimal glider designs for long distance flight is smaller gliders. We learned that because the smaller gliders weighed less they had more lift which allowed them to go farther.
2) One difference was my horizontal stabilizer was not too long. It would say my plane would fly, but that the stabilizer may be too long. This was not the case during testing because my glider seemed it needed more lift. another difference was my glider didn't need 11 grams of nose mass for it to fly. It only needed around 1/2 of that.
3) The most optimal glider designs for long distance flight is smaller gliders. We learned that because the smaller gliders weighed less they had more lift which allowed them to go farther.