Hello readers,

As the quarter draws to a close, parts and materials have been received and finalized with various testing going on. Our Avionics team has been testing several motors to better understand power required to run each motor with different propeller sizes and how much thrust each setup can produce. We used three different motors for tests with propellers ranging from 10 x 7 inches to 11 x7 inches. The Rimfire .10, .15 and .25 were used ranging from weakest to strongest. After doing several trials and versions, it is clear that there are some discrepancies with the data, but they correlate enough to make necessary and thought out assumptions to build off of.

Construction of the plane is making progress but not as much as we had hoped. Testing and continued research of carbon fiber, epoxies, and fiber glass is finishing up and will continue through this week. More time is needed in the machine labs to cut the foam needed for the fuselage. We hope to receive more lab time in the future as rules and conditions are being worked out with faculty members.

The team leads did an excellent job presenting at the Winter Quarter Peer Design Review. Our project, among others, was voted to present at the upcoming Design Review this Friday. A quick thank you to all our peers who voted for this projects as well as the faculty members for giving us the opportunity.

As always, thank you for reading and supporting the project,

Blake Theilacker
btheilac@uci.edu