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4/1/2009

Rice team takes off
Weight-lifting challenge draws aircraft designers to Georgia

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Though the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen has only been open for a few months, great ideas are already flying from it.

A team of six senior Rice engineering students has spent countless hours at the design kitchen during the past two semesters designing and building an airplane. With it, they intend to win the Lockheed Martin/SAE Aero Design East Competition, an annual event for undergraduate and graduate students that will bring together 65 teams from 49 universities in eight countries.

The Night Owl team, along with three advisers and a junior who is observing, will head to an airfield north of Atlanta this weekend to see just how much weight their 8-pound radio-controlled aircraft can lift. In this contest, students must design a vehicle that can satisfy what the rules describe as "potentially conflicting requirements" -- the ability to carry the heaviest payload with the smallest "empty" weight.

Team leader Kevin Hirshberg and members Jake Sutton, Melody Munoz, Teodoro Guzman, Spencer Crouch and Arya Mokhtarzadeh were just about the first occupants of the new facility. They set up shop in the design kitchen even before it had officially opened. "We had to clear all our stuff out before the (dedication) ceremony," recalled Hirshberg, who had little knowledge of aerodynamics before his senior year but will graduate with a finely detailed understanding. "It's definitely a learn-as-you-go kind of project for us."

Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen
Who knew you could build a better mousetrap in the kitchen? Open for business
Rice dedicates unique engineering design facility After weeks of considering possible designs, including a biplane, the team settled on a graceful, top-mounted wing in Rice blue with an H-styled tail modeled on World War II bombers whose mission was to carry cargo aloft, if not to bring it back.

Called the Night Owl, the plane has an 8-foot wingspan and is designed to lift twice its weight -- and a little more, the team hopes -- when it competes against as many as 50 other collegiate entries in the "regular" class. In competition, the plane has to take off within 200 feet, complete a 360-degree circle around the airfield and land without breaking anything except the propeller.

The rules require that all the planes use the same engine, an O.S. Max .61 FX, and that their wingspans plus lengths plus heights total no more than 175 inches. "There's a constrained optimization problem here," said team adviser Peter Loos, a Rice lecturer in mechanical engineering and materials science. "If you make the wingspan too great, then the length of the plane is shorter and you can't control it very well."

In a final test flight last weekend at a radio-control club airfield in Fort Bend, the Night Owl flew with 8 pounds of lead plates as cargo. "There's a risk in doing that, because the more weight the plane carries, the greater the chance of it stalling out and crashing," Loos said.

A crash on the plane's maiden flight about a month ago caused by a misshapen wing taught the team a lot. "It got maybe eight, 10 feet off the ground, but quickly took a sharp turn to the left and came down on the nose," Loos said. The quick fix involved duct tape and zip ties, and the second attempt later that day went much better, he said.

	Watch the Rice team compete April 3-5 at www.teamrcpilot.com/webcast.html and www.ustream.tv/teamrcpilot.
	COURTESY PHOTO
	Members of the Night Owl team examine their work at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. From left are Jake Sutton, Kevin Hirshberg, adviser Eric Smith, Teodoro Guzman and Melody Munoz. They and their teammates will fly the Night Owl in Georgia this week in the Lockheed Martin/SAE Aero Design East competition.

The builders have great confidence in adviser Sam Grice, a licensed radio-control pilot who has flown for the Rice team for many years. "Either someone on the team has to learn to fly and get licensed, or you have to have someone from outside the team fly for you," said Hirshberg. "Rice has had Sam fly the planes for the last 10 years or so, and we're happy to continue that. He knows what he's doing."

Also on the road trip to Atlanta will be adviser Eric Smith, a technician and inspector for Southwest Airlines, who worked with the team throughout design and construction, and observer Young Suk, a junior engineering student.

This will be the first time in a few years Rice has entered the competition. "We had to miss a couple of years," Loos said. "While Ryon Lab was undergoing construction down in the basement, they tore out the area where we used to build planes, and for two years we couldn't have a team.

"So this year, like the phoenix, we are rising from the ashes."

The team is one of 13 formed from those taking Mechanical Engineering 407-408 this year. Other teams in the classes are tackling such projects as down-hole tools for oil drilling, wind-turbine blade optimization, solar-cell testing devices, two vertical takeoff and landing projects, a Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems project, a collaborative project with NASA to design a rotor-wing recovery system for space capsules and two bioengineering collaborative endeavors: a robotics project for muscle rehabilitation and a respiratory management project designed to control the breathing of lung cancer patients during radiation therapy.