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 we hope to have a plane ready to fly by the first week of Spring quarter. The budget has been set and may need some adjusting depending on the responses we get from various funding opportunities.

After attending the progress review a few weeks ago, it was brought to our attention that our project had no real direction and we were just building a plane for the design units. However, through a lot of discussion and debate, the team decided on applying a mission that the plane shall try to complete. The mission is to be able to create an autonomous aircraft that surveils a predestined area for approximately four hours at roughly 1000 feet. Then the teams started to meet up and go over research and design tasks for the coming weeks.

The Aerodynamic design team has currently designed a wing and tail as shown in the image above and are currently working on designing the fuselage. These designs are preliminary and may change as we research more. The materials are still being researched but the dimensions of the plane have been confirmed after today’s meeting

The Avionics team has been researching different flight controllers, motors and helping out with UROP and TGIF proposals. They have decided to use the Pixhawk flight controller as it seems the most suitable for our size of plane and its ease of access and understanding. The motor is to be determined soon as calculations and discussions are done about how much power will be readily available from the power system.

The power systems team has been researching different solar cells, companies, funding opportunities as well as means to achieve the most efficient power system. Currently, the team is in talks with Alta Devices to obtain solar cells and possible sponsorship because of the rather expensiveness of the solar cells.

Now that the administrative work is wrapping up, the research into various topics across the teams have intensified and the designs are coming together. Questions? Comments? Feedback? If so, please email me or the project manager Benjeet at bkhabra@uci.edu.

Thank you for reading.

Blake Theilacker
btheilac@uci.edu