Glider Project
Gliders are a unique type of aircraft. Unlike most aircraft which are propelled by a power plant, gliders use a descending altitude to maintain airspeed. In our case, we were to build a wooden glider that would be launched into the air. The “power plant” could be seen as the rubber band used to sling it forward. Our goal was for that glider to reach a distance of at least 50 feet before touching the ground. I constructed a canard style glider with the horizontal stabilizer in the front and the main wing in the back. It included a sweep angle, and a slight taper ratio on both surfaces. We were restricted to using one piece of balsa wood an one piece of basswood. Other than that, we were pretty much free to make whatever design we could think of as long as it said “It will fly!” on the AERY simulator. We went through a systematic design process of brainstorming, planning, testing, building, and finally flying our final prototype.
Shown above is the configuration for the wood
Above is the platform of my glider.
Above are the plans for my glider.
The first picture above is of the glider during the building process. In that picture specifically, I was preparing to glue the vertical stabilizer. The second picture is of me preparing the glider to be launched.
This is the video of my best flight, flying 80 feet to the door.
This is the data sheet of my flight test and overall glider design assessment.
As said before, our goal was to reach 50 feet. My glider flew all the way to the doors which is an extra 30 feet past my original goal and it was still flying if it didn’t hit the window.
The glider project will be one to remember. It’s definitely one of my favorites, if not, my favorite in the history of engineering projects I’ve done. I love aviation so to be able to make something fly in school was something really cool for me. My glider performed extremely well and would of gone way farther than 80 feet if the doors weren’t there. All of my official tests went past 50 feet but the launch angle is really what determined the distance after that. Believe it or not, I got my best distance by aiming my glider slightly downward. This allowed for a bit of the ground effect to occur and left much room for my airfoil to cause altitude gain and because of that, it would reach a peek altitude and glide smoothly and efficiently down to the ground. I was able to follow the plans very well, in my opinion I was very precise with my cuts and overall construction. I believe my glider flew so well because I took the time to sand an aggressive airfoil into the horizontal stabilizer and into the wing. Due to this, my glider was able to operate efficiently in creating lift with minimal drag while maintaining a firm airspeed with forgiving stall characteristics. I believe more nose weight would of made my glider fly better. Even with 7 grams of nose weight which is what AERY recommended, it still had a slight pitch up tendency but that wasn’t anything to worry about because it occurred after 50 feet. I believe I incorporated the design process well because I really took time during the planning phase to make sure I had a good design on the AERY simulator. I had a blast on this project and look forward to what’s next.
Conclusion
A strength of this method is that it will encourage competition. Through every launch, I noticed classmates pushing their designs to beat other classmates. A weakness would be that they could push their design too hard and result in their creation breaking before they could reach the goal as some did.
My glider performed extremely well but on AERY I was 18 points above what the perfect score of 130 was. I still thought it would fly well but I didn’t expect it to go 80+ feet.
For long distance flight, it all comes down to how well you can make your design. You can make a canard fly just as good as a normal style aircraft it just depends on how well you can design it as the canard will be harder. Real life gliders typically aren’t canard style, but that’s not to say they can’t also fly well in real life. In this project, there were some normal style gliders that also flew very well.