Bezmiechowa 2013 - Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Contest

The 10th Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Contest took place from 20th to 23rd of September 2013 in Bezmiechowa, organized by Association of Young Aerospace Engineers. It gathered 3 teams from polish technical universities. One of them was ours - EUROAVIA Rzeszow. This year we improved our airplane by adding vertical tips for better handling characteristics and we designed, built and tested pneumatic catapult. It enabled us to launch UAS-X1 with  greater take-off mass, than rubber propelled catapult used before. Below you can find compilation of photos and videos from flights in Bezmiechowa.

You can find more information about contest at  http://www.miwl.smil.org.pl/glowna.html

Test flight with modified wing tips

At the beginning of July we managed to conduct some test flights with modified wing tips for improvement of manoeuvrability and directional stability. We mentioned about their design and manufacturing process in March. Their layout was designed according to principles explained in "Tailless aircraft in theory and practice" - Karl Nickel, very useful textbook by the way. 

Below you can find short movie summarizing that stage of the project and test flights. 

 

As we expected, flight characteristics improved a lot in comparison to the first test flight, it confirmed that layout of the geometry and position of the center of the gravity was designed in the right way. Having that confidence we decided to proceed to the next stage of the project and focus on detailed structural design. We will cover that subject on the next posts, stay tuned. 

After a long winter spent on optimization and analysis, we got back to work in workshop. Recently we fitted vertical stabilizers on wing tips of our BSL-X1. Hopefully it will improve flight characteristics during turns and other flight manoeuvres.

Fig. 1 Stabilizers geometry optimization and scetching

Fig. 2 3D model of  vertical stabilizers

Fig. 3 Vacuum-bag with composite stabilizers inside while curing