Real World Design Challenge

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Thursday May 19, 2011

SBHS students took all the prizes in the state competition in the Real World Design Challenge again this year, with teams of students taking the top three places in the Governor’s Cup competition.  19 SBHS students competed this year in three teams on an advanced design problem—nothing less than designing a wing for a business jet aircraft.

Gold Team (pictured at right) (Front, L-R): Neharika Khandavalli, Vishnu Premsankar,  Basundhara Mukherjee, (Rear): Matthew Gilmartin, Neel Desai, Jonathan Girard, Austin Goddard

Silver Team: Mrinal Asthana, Rhonat Bhagat, Noah Bugbee, Raihan Kabir, Forrest Scharmer

Bronze Team: Matt Bouvier, James Brachitta, Grace Iasilli, Ethan Jones, Ariel Langevin, Fathima Sameen, Rob Tuttle

The Real World Design Challenge (RWDC) is managed and sponsored by a large public-private partnership of companies involved in the design and aerospace industries, government agencies, academic institutions, and professional organizations.  The competition is designed to immerse students in the roles that would be filled by members of a professional design team, faced with a difficult engineering problem.  Students use advanced, professional-grade software to develop, test, and analyze their designs, following the same phases that a real design team would as they work towards a solution. 

To complete this year’s challenge, students researched airfoils, selecting multiple examples that they thought would work well within the published design constraints.  They modeled their wings using PTC ProEngineer 3D CAD software so that they could run fluid dynamics analysis using Mentor Graphics’ FloEFD software.  Students analyzed the results with MathCAD, selecting the best performing airfoil.  They experimented with modifying airfoils at different locations along the wing and with other variables, such as sweep angle, pitch and twist, to optimize the aerodynamics of their design.

In previous years, this would have been enough, but not for the 2011 competition.  Once students had developed the optimal aerodynamic design, they needed to work on the wing’s internal structure, placing ribs and fuel cells as they would be in the constructed aircraft.  They needed to define the materials that would be used throughout the wing, choosing carbon fiber or aluminum where appropriate for stiffness and strength, while minimizing weight.  To top it all off, students needed to account for the lessening of the load of the fuel stored in the wing as it is burned during flight and the effect this has on aerodynamics, designing in passive aeroelastic tailoring, or the ability of the wing to change its shape slightly to improve its aerodynamics as the load on the wing changes.

If all this sounds like rocket science—it should.  Students worked with mentors in the aerospace industry and these professionals repeatedly commented on the requirements of the challenge and the students’ amazing performance.  Multiple mentors stated that the students were performing at a level not typically seen in graduate-level college projects.  All three teams logged over 100 hours of after-school time for the state challenge and the top team logged over 300 hours before completing the national challenge, producing  over 200 pages of reports.

As a result of their efforts, the top two teams each won a laptop computer and the first place winning Blue Angels entered the national competition, receiving an all-expenses paid trip to Washington, DC to present their improved design to a panel of industry and governmental aeronautics experts.

South Burlington is very proud of the efforts and performance of these students.

SOURCE: Stephen Barner, SBHS Technology Dept.