Ollie Krause
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2020
- Messages
- 103
Hi Home Built Airplanes Enthusiasts,
My name is Ollie Krause and I'm happy to introduce Flight Club Aerospace, an aerospace design team organized and run by students from several high schools around the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the past couple months, we've been working to design our own part 103 compliant electric ultralight aircraft which we hope to begin constructing this summer. The Home Built Airplanes forum has been an invaluable resource when designing our wing and fuselage and it was suggested we create our own thread to document our progress and get community feedback. We already have a ton of documentation and resources at FlightClubAerospace.com but we'll try to keep this thread updated with any major changes. We ultimately hope that our ultralight project can leave a lasting educational legacy for students and hobbyists alike through our open sourced designs and resources. We are still early in the detail design phase but here are some photos of our current wing and fuselage designs which can be downloaded, remixed, and viewed in 3D in our public Onshape document.
Here are some quick details on the specs of the aircraft (more detailed resources can be found on our website linked above):
General Design Philosophy:
We aren't professionals and, as high school students, our math abilities are limited at those provided by our school's honors calculus classes. With these limitations in mind, we believe the best way to approach designing our ultralight aircraft is conceptually, basing our design decisions off similar aircraft. Once we have a complete draft of the entire aircraft, we'll follow up with our design mentors and engineers to verify the safety of the airplane before beginning construction.
Wing:
Our wing was heavily inspired by the general wing geometry used by the BeLite ultralights as well as the Affordaplane. Also, the Home Built Airplanes community was super helpful in our wing design process and the thread can be found here. As of this post, we are planning to construct the wing ribs of house insulation foam boards which we will coat in fiberglass on either side and then CNC mill. The rest of the wing is pretty self explanatory and more details can be found in the blog section of our website: FlightClubAerospace.com or on our public Onshape document. We also made our wing fully variabilized so its geometry can be easily adjusted. Here are some general specs of our wing based off some simple calculations and similar aircraft:
Wingspan: 32ft
Chord: 5ft
Dihedral: 3 degrees
Wingtips: Hoerner
Fuselage:
Our fuselage was inspired by the Legal Eagle and uses 6061 T6 aluminum tubes gusseted together. We are designing the fuselage such that no coping is needed to minimize design complexity and make it easier to construct. Please note the fuselage is in a much earlier design phase than the wing and we are yet to determine our wing attachment method.
Powertrain:
We are going to use a 20kw electric powertrain composed of the Rotex Electric REB30 motor, MGM Compro 80120-3EI speed controller, and a 7.08kWh custom battery pack made of 504 Samsung 40T 21700 lithium battery cells. Our current estimates suggest the entire powertrain will weigh around 94 pounds. We've done some pretty extensive research and detailed comparisons to select these exact components and more details can be found from our Powertrain Blog Post.
We'd love to hear the Home Built Airplane Community's thoughts on our designs and are open to any suggestions, concerns, comments, questions, etc. The rest of our team also has Home Built Airplanes accounts and they'll be chipping in below as well.
My name is Ollie Krause and I'm happy to introduce Flight Club Aerospace, an aerospace design team organized and run by students from several high schools around the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the past couple months, we've been working to design our own part 103 compliant electric ultralight aircraft which we hope to begin constructing this summer. The Home Built Airplanes forum has been an invaluable resource when designing our wing and fuselage and it was suggested we create our own thread to document our progress and get community feedback. We already have a ton of documentation and resources at FlightClubAerospace.com but we'll try to keep this thread updated with any major changes. We ultimately hope that our ultralight project can leave a lasting educational legacy for students and hobbyists alike through our open sourced designs and resources. We are still early in the detail design phase but here are some photos of our current wing and fuselage designs which can be downloaded, remixed, and viewed in 3D in our public Onshape document.
Here are some quick details on the specs of the aircraft (more detailed resources can be found on our website linked above):
General Design Philosophy:
We aren't professionals and, as high school students, our math abilities are limited at those provided by our school's honors calculus classes. With these limitations in mind, we believe the best way to approach designing our ultralight aircraft is conceptually, basing our design decisions off similar aircraft. Once we have a complete draft of the entire aircraft, we'll follow up with our design mentors and engineers to verify the safety of the airplane before beginning construction.
Wing:
Our wing was heavily inspired by the general wing geometry used by the BeLite ultralights as well as the Affordaplane. Also, the Home Built Airplanes community was super helpful in our wing design process and the thread can be found here. As of this post, we are planning to construct the wing ribs of house insulation foam boards which we will coat in fiberglass on either side and then CNC mill. The rest of the wing is pretty self explanatory and more details can be found in the blog section of our website: FlightClubAerospace.com or on our public Onshape document. We also made our wing fully variabilized so its geometry can be easily adjusted. Here are some general specs of our wing based off some simple calculations and similar aircraft:
Wingspan: 32ft
Chord: 5ft
Dihedral: 3 degrees
Wingtips: Hoerner
Fuselage:
Our fuselage was inspired by the Legal Eagle and uses 6061 T6 aluminum tubes gusseted together. We are designing the fuselage such that no coping is needed to minimize design complexity and make it easier to construct. Please note the fuselage is in a much earlier design phase than the wing and we are yet to determine our wing attachment method.
Powertrain:
We are going to use a 20kw electric powertrain composed of the Rotex Electric REB30 motor, MGM Compro 80120-3EI speed controller, and a 7.08kWh custom battery pack made of 504 Samsung 40T 21700 lithium battery cells. Our current estimates suggest the entire powertrain will weigh around 94 pounds. We've done some pretty extensive research and detailed comparisons to select these exact components and more details can be found from our Powertrain Blog Post.
We'd love to hear the Home Built Airplane Community's thoughts on our designs and are open to any suggestions, concerns, comments, questions, etc. The rest of our team also has Home Built Airplanes accounts and they'll be chipping in below as well.
