Last week in lab in Sailplane, we certainly had an exciting project going on! The point of this lab session was to test a composite tube. Sounds simple enough right? Well, not exactly. When I first arrived at lab, the guys had already gotten a drill bit stuck in a 2X4 just trying to build the stand needed to test the tube. Eventually, after trying several times, they were able to reattach the bit to the drill and reverse it out of the wood. Next, since the hole still needed to be drilled, they proceeded to stick the bit in the wood again, but luckily, it did not get stuck again. After the stand was built, we beefed it up a little by wrapping heavy duty rope around it several times, which at least kept its movement to a minimum. We then proceeded to spend fifteen minutes cutting up rope to tie around gallons of water. Why you ask? The gallons of water would be strategically placed along the composite tube so we could find its deflection. Deflection is essentially how much the tube will move when it is put under load. A gallon of water doesn’t really seem heavy enough to break a composite tube does it? Trust me, water is MUCH heavier than it looks. Imagine holding your arm straight out from your body, and having someone hang 10 gallon bottles of water from it. Ouch. I don’t want to do that. But that is essentially what we did to our poor tube. After tying the rope around all the gallons, we took measurements at about ten different locations from the ground to the middle of the unstressed tube. After marking the ground where the measurements were taken so that we could make sure we measured from the same location every time, we began loading up the tube. After placing one gallon bottle at each of the pre-measured locations, we recorded the length from the ground to the tube. Since it did not break, we proceeded to add another gallon at each location, and the tube still did not break. After measuring with two gallons at each point, since we no longer needed the tube and had gotten all the information we needed, we decided we just wanted to break it. Now we were inside during this whole thing, so that added a bit of a concern to the test, but we decided to go for it anyway. We had two people hold a 2X4 underneath the end while we moved all of the gallons to the very end of the tube. They then began to lower the wood slowly, but once we heard the tube begin to crack, we got cold feet and took the water gallons off the tube. We decided it wasn’t worth putting six people’s lives in danger just to break a tube for no reason. All in all, it was certainly an informative and exciting lab session, and if you’d like to see us loading the tube, I’ve included a link to the video below.
First off, it may seem weird to dedicate half a post to a location on campus, but the Stuckeman Family Building, which houses various architecture-related majors, is a fairly interesting place. Anyways, for a little background information, the other day, my Sailplane group leader sent me up to Stuckeman. One of the professors and his Grad Students there help us out by cutting our foam ribs for our wing section using their LASER cutter. So I started off on the walk from Hammond (down by College Ave) to Stuckeman (behind Forum) with four pieces of foam board and no clue where I was going. After finding the building, it took me a little while to find this Professor’s office, but I did find some interesting things in my travels. Since it’s home to architectural engineering, naturally the setup of the building itself was very unique, but they also had landscape and structure models in little cases that were neat to look at. After finding the office and dropping off the materials and the accompanying CAD file, I started the trek back to Hammond. Fortunately, at that time I realized I didn’t get a run in that day, and since I only had my phone to carry and I was wearing running clothing, I just decided to jog back to Hammond. Unfortunately, we just found out last night that the LASER cutter is broken, so we might be waiting on those rib pieces for a while.
Now onto that NASA launch. For those of you that don’t know, NASA launched their Antares Rocket on Tuesday, October 28th. Antares was on a mission to resupply the ISS (International Space Station) with various different technologies and provisions. In a launch, NASA Safety Officers have the option to essentially hit the self-destruct button on a launch that they deem unsafe shortly after liftoff (talk about a stressful job). This is exactly what happened Tuesday. A few seconds after liftoff, the rocket began to respond incorrectly, however the exact reason for this issue is still unknown. Because of this mishap, a Safety Officer hit the self-destruct button, resulting in the colorful explosion shown above. What happens now? Well naturally, whenever a launch has to be aborted, NASA loses what little money the government still gives them. Factor in the loss of equipment in a scenario like this, and its basically like taking millions of dollars and chucking it in a fire. As in any failure, information can still be gathered from what went wrong. The loss is still a heavy one for NASA, but thankfully no one was injured at the Wallops Testing Center. And not to make “light” of the situation, but we did get to see a Fourth-of-July-worthy fireworks display in the middle of fall. You can read up more about the process of the mission 
. See where this is going? Yup, we crashed the HPA. And not just a few broken balsa stringers, we crashed the crap out of it. Let me give you the gist of the flight test. The takeoff went pretty smoothly, and everyone cheered as the HPA lifted off into the air. Following that, the plane slowly rose to 300 ft, as our pilot manned the controls from the ground. It’s actually quite a sight to see the person with the controls following behind the aircraft in a car with the sunroof open. Anyways, after reaching 300 ft, the pilot began to attempt some turns. The first turn went off without a hitch, nice and smooth without any indication of what would happen less than a minute later. After successfully completing the turn, the HPA flew off into the sunrise a bit before the pilot attempted another turn. This again, worked out fairly well, but if one is paying close attention to the video, they can see a little downward movement in the left wing. Essentially what happened, or what is believed to have happened, is something failed in the left wing. However, even after that, it continued to fly for a bit longer. On the other hand, once the pilot attempted to descend, disaster struck. Essentially, in an aircraft, when you begin to descend, airspeed increases. With increased airspeed comes an increased load that the aircraft must withstand. It seems that once the HPA began to descend, and thus have an increased speed, the entire wing fails and looses its dihedral (slight angle of the wing, shown in the picture below). 
As soon as that happens, the right wing drops significantly, hits the ground, and the whole HPA sort of self-distructs on top of itself. It certainly was a sight to see, but the HPA is definitely in bad shape, if you can even call it a plane anymore. On a better note, we now get to construct a new HPA, which will certainly be more fun than flying another person’s design and work. Overall, the flight test was certainly informative, and if you have the time I highly suggest watching the video, shown below:
al and very uptight. Neither of these initial ideas were true, on the contrary, the Ted Talks were both very lively, entertaining, and even funny.