With PDR successfully completed, MADS was back to work this week to get a good handle on what tasks need to be tackled for CDR. Thank you to all the PAB members who left feedback for us concerning our PDR presentation. It has helped to provide us with a good feel for the direction we need to take from here, and items to make sure get resolved for CDR.

The MADS team was also able to take advantage of a little bit of down time this past weekend and we all made the trek to Arvada to visit Frank Dilatush of Arvada RC Modelers. Frank invited us down to enjoy some RC shop talk, a bit of pizza, and take a first look at our chosen Sub-Vehicle, the Superfly. Frank was kind enough to invest in two of them for his own enjoyment and has loaned one of them to the MADS team to help along our modeling, simulation and analysis work until we are able to get our hands on our own copy of the plane. So again, a huge thank you to Frank for all of his help during the SV selection and preliminary design phase, and now even more thanks for his continued advice and for loaning us the plane so that we can keep this project moving along. You’ve been invaluable, and we’re having a blast working with you.

As a result of Frank’s generosity, we now have a 3-D model of the Superfly and are currently running it through PowerFlow to get a more accurate characterization as you can see in the pictures this week. The drag polar is largely done, and the numbers are matching up well with our preliminary analysis. From here we hope to model the entire system and get a handle on what needs to happen for a safe and reliable sub-vehicle deployment.

In other areas, the Deployment Mechanism prototyping phase is beginning and initial testing will follow shortly. Along with it, much of the remaining primary vehicle structural analysis as well as material and component selections are being made as well.

So, here’s to another week down. Thanks for following along.

Posted by Travis Schafhausen