Overview
AME 261 is USC’s Basic Flight Mechanics class. The course is focused on elements of flight mechanics, beginning with a review of basic 2D and 3D aerodynamics, propulsion, and performance, then diving deeper into each regime of flight, such as takeoff and landing analysis, climbing flight, cruise, gliding flight, and turning flight.
The final project for the class is a design report. This year, the project was in response to the 2024 AIAA Undergraduate Team Design Competition, whose RFP called for the design of a C-5 replacement capable of carrying 430,000lb of payload, including 3 M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, 48 463L pallets, and 430 fully-equipped troops.
The Report
This was a busy year for the members of my team, so we decided to have some fun with this. We decided to move forward with the design of a hybrid-wing body, inspired by concepts from Airbus and Lockheed.
The full report is attached below (it currently has some printing mistakes, which will be fixed by this author!)
[PDF WILL BE EMBEDDED IN THE FUTURE]
My Work
This author had a few different roles in the project.
From my work in the 2023 AIAA Design Competition, I lead efforts on the initial exploration of the design space, generating the constraint diagrams and initial carpet plots for key performance metrics.
These served as the starting point for the trade study work, where the sized aircraft above was the baseline to be optimized by a more in-depth sweep of the design variables.
I was also responsible for the initial aircraft layouts in OpenVSP, where we had our first-stab at making our configuration work. This was the starting point for the weight and balance analysis to properly arrange payloads and aircraft systems.
Lastly, I was also responsible for the aerodynamic and stability & control analysis for the aircraft. The former was done with methods from DATCOM found in Raymer’s textbook, as well as outputs from OpenVSP. This involved a study on high-lift devices, drag divergence Mach, and airfoil selection (we ended up modifying supercritical airfoils for aero-configuration synnergy)
S&C analysis was conducted with XFLR5 and AVL models. Rules of thumb from literature were used to size control surfaces, and the stability derivatives at the target CG locations were found from the software at the design trim condition.
Trade Study & Performance Codes
Perhaps the most impactful contribution, however, were the trade study codes written by my colleague Nicholas and I. The former was the numerical methods wizard, and I was the apprentice. We implemented medium fidelity time-based models for the takeoff roll, climb, and cruise. We then swept a number of design variables (namely wing area, aspect ratio, and powerplant) to narrow-down our design point.
This author later expanded and refractored this code into DSAeroTools. See the report for a full description of the models and how they were implemented.