Endurance Gliders
Ask
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Project Challenge
We were given a choice between making a throwable chuck glider from foam core sheets, or we could make a rubber band powered propeller glider. Me and my teammate chose the latter deciding a rubber band glider would be a lot more fun and cool.
Research
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Design Research
Me and my teammate did not do much research. The most we did without was looking up airfoil designs as well as how horizontal and vertical stabilizers were designed on airplanes.
We learned that airliners are a LOT more developed and made to maintain weight in comparison to tiny little planes with propellers as they weigh a lot more in general.
Images we used for vertical stabilizer references
Imagine/Plan
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Design Concept
Planning was generally simple, me and my teammate divided up the work, me making the fuselage and the airfoil, while he made the stabilizers and landing gears.
We had simple basswood sheets we could laser cut out of as well as using plastic bags on our airfoils to help generate lift. We connected most of the pieces together by using superglue due to it being lightweight.
My fuselage design
The original airfoil design
Create
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Construction Process
And with that we started cutting out all of these parts by loading them into the software we use for our laser cutter, Inkscape.
Me applying plastic to the airfoil design to generate lift
Image of our fuselage with our work in progress vertical stabilizer
I don't have any pictures of our design with our original airfoil, but we had to scrap it (more on that below) and used a new design in our final product here
Evaluate/Reflection
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Project Evaluation
Now I was sick of the day that we had tried our rubber band gliders so I am just going off what my partner has told me.
• Our plane ended up not doing well at all, our landing gear snapped off, which was a bad start.
• He had learned our plane was back-heavy and added clay along with the landing gear to make it more front-heavy.
• But on the 4th flight, it just broke apart.
But oddly enough, it flew well without the propeller and landing gear, just as a hand-thrown glider.
Overall, we should've worked on balancing our plane more, and making our parts less heavy, which is why our original airfoil had to be scrapped as it weighed too much. The laser cutter we used also sped up the process a thousandfold, allowing us to fabricate our design immediately rather than redesigning everything onto a small piece of wood and meticulously cutting it out. If we had time, I would have made another plane and tried to make a great one.