Hello readers, The final stretch is upon the Solar Airplane project and we are thrilled and motivated to finish the plane on time! This past week, the aero team fabricated the fuselage foam pieces that were also sanded down and glued together. Several pieces needed to be cut individually because of the size of the machines and fuselage. The smoothened …

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 …

Hello readers, These past weeks have been busy for all teams as we head into the fabrication phase. Our power systems teams has been performing tests and gaining hands on experience of the solar cells. One issue that occurred was that the cells were not receiving the soldering well which led to difficulties when trying to connect several together. For …

Hello readers, The project has been following the set time line adequately and will begin manufacturing in the coming week. The biggest challenge for the project is safety of our members when operating machining equipment and handling carbon fiber. Our Safety Officer has compiled a list of safety supplies to be purchased for our members to use in our lab …

Hello readers, This quarter, the team will begin manufacturing and assembling the plane after several preliminary tests are conducted using our model featured in this blog post. The Conscendo S 1.5m RTF features a 4 channel 2.4 GHz transmitter and controller , Li-Po battery and 370-size brushless motor. We decided to go with a model tester to figure out how …

This past Friday, we were able to participate in the Engineering Senior Design Peer Review and present our project as well as explore other projects. Reviewing other projects’ posters gave us insight to team structure conditions, timelines, budgets and some intellectual properties set forth by various teams. It also gave us a moment to ponder what has been done and …

Hello everyone, This week we have finished our aircraft design and successfully modeled it in Solid Works. As you can see in the picture above, we have a T tail, fuelselage, and wing designed and ready for testing and eventual fabrication. One of the main challenges of the design was the fuelselage. Initially we started off with a rather bulky …

Hello All, Our biggest problem with the project currently is the funds for solar cells. Our power systems team has contacted numerous sources but unfortunately have been not as successful as we had originally planned in finding affordable and efficient solar cells. While we wait for a few more responses and figure out how to alleviate this, our power systems …

Hello everyone, The plane design is on schedule and will be completed within the next week. By the end of this week, The avionics team will have selected our motor, various sensors and servos that will accompany our plane. Our plane will be roughly 7.5 pounds and have a wingspan of approximately 6 feet. From this, we know that our …

Hello everyone, In this post, I hope to catch everyone up on what exactly Solar Airplane has been doing the first half of Fall Quarter and where we stand currently. After finalizing the 14 project members, three teams have been solidified (Avionics, Aerodynamic design and Power Systems) and three team leads as well. The team’s timeline has been set and …