Sophomore Design Project of a Value Driven Unmanned Air Vehicle Design

The work presented concerns the application of value driven engineering design to the Sophomore Design Project of an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) conceptual/preliminary design. In this Sophomore Design Project, offered to the Aviation Program students, student teams performed the conceptual/preliminary stages of design of a small UAV (below 5 kilograms) based on a given set of requirements and constructed the selected UAV design in balsa wood. The student taking this course were divided in groups of 4-5 persons and worked to propose, plan and manufactured an aircraft design while they were supervised by a faculty/lab instructor/lab engineer. The student teams were evaluated on their ability to coordinate efforts to propose the aircraft design criteria, aircraft components, resources, implementation schedule, estimate cost and finally construct the optimal UAV design. A large number of UAV configurations and geometries were considered and evaluated in the Multi-Disciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) in order to search the widest possible design space. Moreover, the designed system's operational capabilities and acquisition cost, based on the UAV user's needs and priorities, were employed in the value model to compare the different design alternatives and select the optimal. Following the selection of the flying wing as optimal design, manufacturing of the prototype in balsa wood was performed by the students, with the two student groups constructing this UAV.