As of now, my outline for the paper is complete except for the introduction and conclusion. Constructing a claim for the paper will hopefully be not be too difficult since many sources I have looked at emphasize the
importance of several factors when engineering the wing, especially the size and the weight. From a previous post, I found that "the goal of engineering the wing is to decrease it and make sure the wing is consistent in thickness, at least for the wing box." Conclusion will consist of summing up my findings and discussing my thesis.
The difficult part is coming up with ideas for the presentation. I think my best bet for a good presentation now is to let everyone build paper airplanes with different wing designs and have different airplane flying competitions for different criteria, like which one can fly the highest or the fastest. I don't think I can build a wing and actually show everyone wind tunnel testing...I could try with a fan but the presentation would not be as interesting as the paper airplanes...
This was a fun project to work on. I like how I could tie some things I learned in math into this project without having to actually do the math or understand it too deeply. I'll miss doing the research part as I now move on to the actual paper writing...
Cool idea! I think the paper airplane demonstration would be really cool and interactive (unlike mine...), or perhaps maybe you could pre-construct 2-3 medium-sized planes with strings attached to the tops and have them glide down a sloping string. Then time it to see which plane made it down the fastest.
ReplyDeleteMr. Skinner said: I was glad to see that you've enjoyed the research process and the things
ReplyDeleteyou've learned. It really is exciting to learn something new, and
especially when you teach yourself, I think.
I like the idea of using a fan to show the lift that can be achieved using
Bernoulli's principle. In addition to paper plane building, you could
involve the class by doing a couple of easy demos like blowing between two
pieces of paper and see that instead of going further apart they actually
get closer, showing that the pressure is lower when the velocity is higher.
There are several such demos available on the internet.