So this last week has been more of a time to get organized and ready to rock these last few weeks before CDR. On Sunday, the team met and we came up with a large list of tasks, due dates, and the person responsible for it. Emphasis was put on the most project-critical components--IE prototyping and testing our deployment mechanism in various conditions.

Early on in the week, a series of 47 PowerFLOW simulations were completed. These had details on the lift, drag, and moments for various angles of attack and control deflections for both our PV and SV. The results were spectacular and resulted in text-book perfect drag polars for unsteady flows. The results were verified with some simple BOTEs the team had done for PDR.

With these aerodynamic results, the team split up into two parts: 1 sub-team working on fully classifying the performance of the SV and another sub-team working on the dynamics of dropping the SVs.

On the other side of the spectrum, our deployment mechanism is being prototyped and will be done early next week and we are busy working on the structural reinforcement problem of how we will attach the bracket that will hold the deployment mechanism. A comprehensive FEM model is currently being developed to tackle this design challenge.

The rest of the team is working on the test plans and managerial work.

Next week will be interesting as a few of our team members are leaving for various events, however, it will be busy with testing of the deployment mechanism, wind tunnel testing of the propulsion system for the SV, material testing for the reinforcement on the PV will all take place. Also, the Matlab "drop dynamics" model of what happens to the SV when we drop it from the plane will then be verified in PowerFLOW with an iterative approach to ensure the results are valid and fall within the capabilities of the software package.

Posted by Jeff Mullen