Aero SAE
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Every year, UC Berkeley's ASAE team, designs and manufactures remote controlled airplanes for the international SAE West competition. Design begins with engineering analysis to choose airfoils for the wing and empennage and determine the geometries of each part of the plane. Next, we build and test fly prototypes of our planes. From the prototype flight data and after more analysis, we finalize our design and build two airplanes for the competition.

2017

As the empennage design lead, my focus was on the stability of the airplane. For this year's plane, Cal-5, I designed a fuselage-mounted tail that provided stability as well as pitch and yaw control to the airplane during its flight. I managed the design, prototyping, and manufacturing of the empennage and trained subteam members on design and building techniques for the tail. During the design phase, we used SolidWorks to CAD the tail components and ANSYS for CFD analysis. Balsa was used for the tail's ribs and sheeting, while spruce was used for its spars and servo mounts. The tail is covered in Monokote for an aerodynamic surface.

Cal-5 placed fifth in flight at the SAE West Competition in March 2017. We were all very proud to see our hard work take off!

2016

Affectionately called AirBears and CalVisitor after our school Wi-Fi networks, our competition planes had a nine-foot wing, a three-vertical-stabilizer empennage, and a conventional fuselage. We placed 29th in the regular class competition, and this was our 2nd year of competing.

As part of the empennage subteam this year, I was involved in the early stages of design up to manufacturing our final competition planes. I modeled empennage designs with SolidWorks, prepared parts them for laser cutting with Adobe Illustrator, and employed my woodworking skills in assembling the plane.





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