End of our Aero Journey

Tomorrow marks the end of our aerospace journey. The past few months of our aerospace journey was indeed enriching as we got to learn things which we do not usually get the chance to learn in our daily lives, especially when we are all from the School of Business and Accountancy.

Last week, we had our glider competition. Although it was not a success for us, we will not be discouraged as it is the mistakes that we learn from. We found out that the problem could be due to the angel in which we threw the plane, as well as the weight of the glider. Nevertheless, we had fun creating this glider and even though it is not the best, we are still proud of our creation. If there is another glider competition in the future, we believe that we will be able to learn from our mistakes and create a more effective glider!

Although tomorrow is our final quiz, which also marks the end of our journey, we will bring this knowledge with us in the future. The next time we take a flight, we will know the basics of its operations!

Making of Gliders

Today, we met up at Jia Le's place to make and test our gliders for the upcoming test on Thursday. We decided to use paper for our glider as it was the most cost efficient material which allows a good lift due to its light weight and wing area. What you are going to see here are what we trialed and tested during our time there.

The above blue plane is our original design, which we tweaked the end of the wing tip to give it winglets to help it fly better by reducing the plane's drag.

As you can see, we added two rings under the plane, making use of the boundary layer effect to create more lift. From this angle, you can see that we attempted to improve the glider's stability by giving it a dihedral angle wing. In addition, we created as much wing area as possible to increase the lift of the flight.

We even tried the World Record plane and it really can fly well! However, we decided not to use it as we wanted to create something new using our own knowledge, in hope of creating a decent glider which has a good lift and thrust with minimal reliance on other sources.

Jia Le working diligently on our final product. =)

A closer peek.

THIS IS OUR FINAL GLIDER, TO BE SHOWCASED ON COMING THURSDAY.

This is the prototype of our masterpiece, which may be of interest to you. =)

And we are pretty much ready for the challenge! See you 4 days later! :D

Propulsion Exercise Reflection - Welon

It was fun trying to propel the ping pong ball. With the materials given, we could not find out how to propel the ping pong ball initially. We thought it was the lack of force from the balloon because for some reason the cone shape that we thought would work theoretically did not, instead the reverse cone shape worked. We still have a lot to learn about how air moves. Most of the methods we tried were trial and error until one finally succeeded. We ended up cutting the paper several times as well due to crumpling the 'mouth'.

Hands-on Activity in Class

We were given a set of materials consisting of 2 A4 papers, a balloon, a ping pong ball, scotch tape and scissors. The aim of this activity is to propel the ping pong ball into the air, as high as possible.

Jia Le trying to blow the balloon, haha. XD

Group mates hard at work coming up with a solution.

This is already Attempt #n. 

We even did research! Talk about being diligent.... Or desperate. HAHAHA.

And finally.................. THE LONG AWAITED OUTCOME.

WE DID IT!

We made quite a number of attempts, thinking that the mechanism would be rather complex. However, when we finally got to the desired outcome, it was actually not as complicated as we thought. We just had to roll the paper and fit the ping pong ball snugly at the bottom of the paper roll. Next, just release the air from the balloon and TADA! The ball was successfully propelled into mid-air!

Watch how we did it. ^^

Individual Reflection - By Guo Ren

Personally, I believe that our group have think to hard when what was needed was just a simple trick.
Ironically, thinking straight and formally didn't allow us to get the correct answer, stupid ideas (by me) actually worked.

So what actually worked is that having a cone shaped paper and the ping pong ball in it, and having the balloon's outlet to be directly below, just take note that the smaller end of the cone must not be so SMALL, and fit into the outlet of the balloon. If you do so, then it wouldn't work. make the smaller end just relatively smaller than the other end and allow the air from the balloon to push the ping pong ball. Due to limited papers, I couldn't conduct experiments to find the relationship of the height of ping pong ball pushed up by air, and the narrowness of the smaller end of the tube(cone).

Overall, it was a fun experiment, seeing everybody thinking hard, trying to get ideas to work etc.
And a fun note: We're the second group to be successful before all other groups became successful.

Jet Turbine and Game Quiz

In the lesson today, we had a demonstration of how a jet turbine works and a game quiz where our class is split into two groups to compete.

For the jet turbine demo, we were told to take note of the temperature inside the turbine, as well as the Revolutions Per Minute (RPM). After putting on the headphone, we could hardly hear a thing until the turbine started up, and we could actually hear the noises made by the engine, thus the actual noise level must be really deafening. When it first started, there was a blast of non-luminous flames at the output and a smell of kerosene burning. We saw that the highest RPM went up to over 80,000. The temperature in the turbine increased to a few hundred as well.

Next, for the game quiz. Our group managed to answer every single of our questions correctly and when the other group answered theirs incorrectly, we solved them instantly!! :D
Our score was 230 which was more than two times of the other group's score. WE WERE ALL EXTREMELY ELATED!! :D We did not study in vain. :)

Thoughts on jet engine and game (Welon)

The jet engine was kind of scary honestly. The fact that we can hear it through the headphones relatively clearly kind of makes me shudder thinking what will happen to my ears if I was listening to it without the headphones. It was pretty cool though, and the fire was interesting but kind of short. It did remind me of something I've seen in the past though, can't really recall what it was but perhaps it was the engine of a plane. The air stank though, as air was used up and we could smell the fuel I think.
Nonetheless, it was a fun experience overall

-Welon