Aero SAE Competition

Some may call it beginners’ luck, but the success of CSUN’s 21-person team of mechanical engineering seniors in the Society of Automotive Engineers’ Aero Design competition April 24-26 was the result of lots of analysis, hard work and ingenuity. It had been nine years since a CSUN team had entered the competition, so unlike their competitors, the 2015 entrants had no design legacy to draw from and had to start from scratch.

The Aero SAE competition calls for the student teams to design, build and fly aircraft that meet specific criteria, and the CSUN team entered the advanced division, which required them to simulate a humanitarian aid cargo drop. In addition to designing an aircraft with a high lift-to-weight ratio, they had to design it to weigh no more than eight pounds and to drop a separate three-pound expellable cargo on a ground target from 100 feet—a feature that required a camera and telemetry.

In approaching the competition, the team members, all part of a senior design class, did background research on the competition rules to determine how they could prioritize points. Because they wanted to model the project after a serious engineering endeavor, they decided to approach it from an aerospace engineering perspective and perform as an aerospace engineering company would, with the team captain serving as chief systems engineer and with group leads for controls, propulsion and structure serving as group supervisors. The team designed a wholly composite aircraft—one of only two teams out of 70 entrants to have an entirely composite structure.

In the end, their diligent work paid off when they placed first in design presentation and third overall—a showing that left many at the competition surprised that such an accomplished team seemingly came out of nowhere.

“I think it just goes to show the rigor with which we applied the engineering design process,” says Vladimir Arutyunov, who captained the team. “One of the core principles of engineering is that it shouldn’t matter what system you’re designing—if you have a strong team and good fundamentals, you should be able to take any assignment and build it.”