Korea Human Powered Aircraft Competition Lessons Learned

초록

This paper describes aircraft design methodologies that were developed to design human powered aircraft for the 2014 and 2015 Korea Human Powered Aircraft Competition and the lessons learned from building and flying the two human powered aircraft. As the main participants of the competitions were undergraduate students who are not experienced with aircraft design and construction, constraints such as skill level, transportation, or other logistical issues became important. Two design methodologies, one aerodynamic and one structural technique were developed to address the problems. For the aerodynamic design, lifting tail was used to minimize the size of the aircraft while providing opportunities to practice building techniques using the horizontal tail. For the structural design, a technique to calculate the stress in the spar caps in the presence of bracing wires are developed using a simple beam theory. During the two-year period, two aircraft were designed and built. The first aircraft flew about 75 meters and demonstrated the effectiveness of the design. The second aircraft employed numerous improvements from the initial experience that resulted in a lighter structure with a larger wingspan. However, the main spar structure failed right after takeoff. The characteristics of each aircraft, flight results, and lessons learned through the whole process are presented in the paper.