The final Aegea 2m glider
This was a voluntary project under the Aeromodelling Club in the summer holidays from May 2015 to July 2015. The aim of the project was to build a composite glider.
The composite glider “Aegea 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.
The wings of the aegea were polyhedral with a dihedral in the middle and 1 more angle on each side totalling 3 dihedrals. These were carefully built to maintian the same angle to ensure roll stability. The hollow fuselage was developed from moulds which were again in turn made from composite materials. 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 was the first time that composite materials were being used in the Aeromodelling Club, IIT Kanpur. This project opened up a whole array of opportunities for the club to divest into composite construction of other designs including flying wings, UAVs etc.
Prasang Gupta
Senior Associate, Emerging Technologies
My research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing and programmable matter.