The final Allegro 2m glider
This was a voluntary project under the Aeromodelling Club in the summer holidays from May 2016 to July 2016. The aim of the project was to train a team to build a composite glider as well as try a new kind of HLG glider, the Allegro 2m.
As mentioned, the composite glider “Allegro 2m” was chosen for this project. The different airfoils were directly obtained from Prof. Mark Drela’s page and templates were cut using laser cutter. These templates were then used to cut the foam which would form the base of the wings / tails using a gravity hot wire cutter. These foam cuttings were then covered with an optimal number of glass fibre and carbon fibre sheets for providing it hte strength it needs. The optimum layers were calculated by designing a MATLAB code to take into account shear stress at different locations of the wing while in flight.
Contary to the previous glider that was developed, this glider was also polyhedral but there was no dihedral in the middle and there were 2 angles on each side totalling 4 dihedrals. This ensured much better construction as giving a dihedral in the middle is very tricky. These were carefully built to maintian the same angle to ensure roll stability. The hollow fuselage was developed from the previously developed moulds. The hollow tail was built using cross arranged rolled carbon fibre cloth. Lastly, the wings and tails were spray painted and then all of the components were assembled together.
This project created a trend of using composite materials for fabrication in the Club paving way for future projects like “Composite Flying Wing”, etc.
Prasang Gupta
Senior Associate, Emerging Technologies
My research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing and programmable matter.