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

Shuang Yu's first solo flight!

In this flight simulator, it was pretty easy to control the flight as I just had to press a few buttons to move the plane towards the target. It allowed to get a better understanding of how to control a plane and what each individual controllers do. Through this simulator, I managed to gain more knowledge through a fun software! I hope that there will be more simulators for us to try out next time.

In the first mission, I used the rudder to control the yaw of the flight to face the noose of the plane towards the target point. Next, I used the elevators to control the pitch of the flight in order to fly at the same level as the target point, and the rudders and ailerons to position the plane to fly towards the target. At the last mission, I made use of mostly the ailerons to roll the plane into the position in which it can fit through the slot. After which, i used the elevators to make sure that the pitch is right so that the plane will not collide with the barriers.

Although this simulator is rather easy to control and achieve the targets, I believe that it is not so in real life as there are so much more for us to learn. This simulator triggered my interest in flying a plane so much more that i used to. I hope that in the future, I will have a chance to fly a real plane, at least once in my lifetime!