Engineering news
After two years of separate events, the virtual competition and live fly-off at BFMA Buckminster (26-29 June) will combine into a single contest, with almost 30 teams taking part, including new entrants from the University of Leicester and the Manipal Institute of Technology in India.
Previously open to groups of master’s students, this year’s event is open to university students at any stage in their degree, giving them vital engineering experience at the earliest opportunity.
Virtual testing
The integration of the virtual and live events means that all teams will take part in a simulation element, tasked with building the most accurate reflection of their design in simulation software to test in a virtual environment. The teams will also submit ‘pilot handbooks,’ guidance documents that explain how the aircraft is flown, such as a specific airspeed that is best for handling.
“The engineering world today is leaning more on simulation,” said Kristina Panikkar, project manager on the event steering group. “They can take their computational fluid dynamics analysis, they can take all their aerodynamics analysis, and they can go ‘Right, let’s put this now in an actual aircraft simulation… Do we need to change the aerofoils? Do we need to change the weight distribution, the weight of the battery packs?’”
The change means that all teams can take part in nearly every element of the competition, regardless of whether or not they are able to build a physical aircraft or attend the event in person.
“It still gets them used to the design lifecycle up to that point,” said Panikkar. “It’s a good way of getting new teams involved, where they don’t understand what the workload is with producing a full aircraft, or they haven’t got the full support or the backing that they need to be able to do that.”
After the designs are ‘flown’ in the software, the team with the best-performing virtual model will receive an award.
Autonomous flight
With an increased focus on aircraft reliability, organisers have removed optional missions such as target recognition from the fly-off event. The main mission will test the drones’ ability to deliver a simulated humanitarian payload to within a certain distance of a waypoint, and the endurance test will push their performance to the limit.
Other updates include a change to the scoring of test flights, which each team can make a maximum of three times. Rather than an average, the teams will be marked on their best score, but an award for reliability has also been introduced to encourage more teams to build aircraft that can take off and land multiple times without an overhaul. Points will no longer be awarded for manual flight, meaning that each team will need to get autonomous flight working.
Innovation on the rise
Conventionally, groups have focused on fixed-wing designs, but organisers expect an increase in the number of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) craft this year. “The rules were really written towards fixed-wing aircraft,” said Pannikar. “We’ve opened that up a bit so that multicopters and helicopters can be part of it, because we don’t want to stifle innovation.”
The event is an invaluable introduction to the way industrial projects work, the current organiser and former contestant added, and teaches students the value of trial and error.
“This is the next generation of engineers,” said Pannikar. “In 10 years’ time, you might see an aircraft that has been in this competition actually out on a production line.”
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.