Engineering Projects/FanWing/Howard Community College/Spring 2012/689 Aeroxperts

Problem Statement
The goal was to build an aircraft using the fanwing concept.This aircraft has a cross-flow fan along the span of each wing. The fan pulls the air in at the front and then expels it over the wing's trailing edge. In transferring the work of the engine to the rotor, which spans the whole wing, the FanWing accelerates a large volume of air and achieves unusually high lift-efficiency.

Team Members
Inh117

Sali6089

deakin2074

Summary
Week 0: We mostly did Brain storming and were coming up with different ways of making the squirrel cage or the cross-flow fan of the aircraft. The cross-flow fan is basically the heart of this project.

Week 1: We drew up several designs and understood how the concept of how the fanwing works.This documentationFanWing made us understand of how the cross flow works.

Week 2: Different ideas came from everyone in the team. For the cross-flow fan, Dan came up with the idea of using window blinds, which would go through a hamster roller, but Syed's idea wasn't going to work because the hamster roller would be pretty heavy and big for the aircraft, so Ian came up with the idea of using CD's and putting the blind folds through them.Ian also created 3D design of the aircraft.

Week 3: Syed bought all the materials that we needed for the project.

Week 4: The construction of the cross-flow fan began.

Here are a few photos while working on the project

Story
This project is a big project. A lot of brainstorming is required in order to start off this project. The heart of this project is the cross-flow fan or squirrel cage, once that's done the rest is not that hard to finish off.The goal of this project is to create an aircraft using the fanwing concept. Fanwing aircraft has a cross-flow fan along the span of each wing. The fan pulls the air in at the front and then expels it over the wing's trailing edge. In transferring the work of the engine to the rotor, which spans the whole wing, the FanWing accelerates a large volume of air and achieves unusually high lift-efficiency.

Week 0, was all about brainstorming, different ideas came from everyone in the team. By week 1 everyone had an idea of how a Fanwing works, this documentation FanWing gave us a clear picture of how a Fanwing works and during week 1 Ian basically summarized all the info that was in that documentation. By week 2, everybody came with different ideas of how the cross flow will look like, Dan came up with the idea of using window blinds, the window blinds idea was great and was agreed upon everyone in the team. The window blinds have a design that would work great as fan, and would also provide a greater upthrust. Syed came up with the idea of using a small hamster wheel that would have linear holes in them in order for the blind folds to go in them, but his idea wouldn't have worked because hamster wheels are heavy and embedding them on the aircraft would have damaged the entire aircraft. So, Ian came up with the idea of using CD's instead, the CD idea was great, and was also agreed by everyone in the team. The good thing about the CDs is that the CDs spin at a very high revolution if they are attached to a generator. By week 3, during spring break, Syed gathered all the materials that we needed for this project and those materials which was agreed upon by everyone in the team. By week 4 construction of the cross-flow began. several thin pieces of wood, which were 48 cm in length were cut in half and were attached to the CD's. In the CD's, drill holes were made around the CD's and each hole had to be a less than a cm apart from each other. After attaching the thin pieces of wood to the CD's, window blinds were glued around the thin pieces of wood. By the end of week 4 1/3rd of the cross flow was done.

Decision List
The window blinds idea was agreed upon by everyone in the team. Window blinds have a design that would be great in helping the plane creating an upthrust. The CD idea was also agreed upon by everyone in the team. Attaching a generator to the CD's would result in greater revolutions per second that would result in greater upthrust as well.

Material List
Materials that were needed outside of the engineering lab.Here is the list of the materials that we used for this project:

1 Window blinds, 32 in Wide and 64 in length, $4.65

2 15 thin pieces of wood,48 cm in length and less than a cm in diameter, 76 cents each

3 CD's, 10 pieces pack, $5.89

Materials which were used from the Engineering lab

4 Mikita Drilling machine

5 clamp

6 seesaw

7 scissors

8 hot glue gun

9 100 cm ruler

10 Markers and pens

The cost of the materials was approximately $11.50

Software List
SolidWorks 2010 CAD software was used to create the initial soft designs used to construct the Fanwing. We used PowerPoint 2007 for our poster. The interface provided is simple and intuitive to navigate an easily edited as it is a software package specifically for creating presentations using images and text boxes.

Time
We worked 21 hrs on this project.

Tutorials
This documentation and video really helped us understand how the project works:

Understanding the concept of FanWing and how it works

FanWing

Next Steps
On this team pg we made 1/3rd of the crossflow fan, which is 25 cm in length, so the next steps is to make a 50-75 cm of the cross flow, but before we start building that we need to test to see whether 25 cm cross flow works or not by using a generator and identify any errors, once we do that we need to build the body of the aircraft and the 50-75 cm cross flow I.e. if there are no errors.