Week 1
During Preliminary testing of the AEV Division L noticed the base AEV ran very inefficiently and would require a lot of power to move the AEV at all. When the first week of the Advanced Research & Development period (AR&D) came, Division L decide to research if changing propeller configurations would improve efficiency of the design. The AEV was tested with two different types of propellers one with a diameter of 6.5 cm and the other with a diameter of 8cm. Each set of propellers were tested in a push-pull and pull-push method. The push-pull method is where the propellers would be pushing the AEV forward and pulling it on the way back and vice versa for the pull-push method.
Results
(click to enlarge)
From the tests it was concluded that the 8cm propellers were completely better than the 6.5cm ones. The AEV traveled much farther with the 8cm propellers up to 12 times farther. What was concluded from the tests were that the pull-push(the yellow line) method was more efficient because it was able to roll nearly an extra whole meter from when the motor cut. The push-pull(the purple line) didn’t travel as far but stopped much more accurately. This would be important for final design because the AEV will have to stop at stations to pick up passengers.
Week 2
During the second week of AR&D Division L tested different motor configurations to see if the placement of the motors affected efficiency. The experiment changed the angle of the wings carrying the motors to see which best. The wings were adjusted to 45º(blue line), 90º(yellow line), 180º(red line) and ran using one code.* Issues with this test the group ran into was time constraints made it difficult to take apart and rebuild the AEV with the different configurations in time but all tests were able to conducted in the time allotted.
45º Wings
90º Wings
180º Wings
Results
(click to enlarge)
After conducting the tests the 180º wing made the AEV travel the farthest compared to the other configuration. Therefore the division concluded that having the flat winged set up will lead to the AEV traveling as far as possible with less power.
Summary
Both research are made to allow our AEV design to be more marketable. In the propeller configuration research, the team end up decide to use push-pull system for our AEV design since it provides safety to those who are riding the AEV as it can come to a full stop immediately if anything happened. The motor configuration test how the position of motor will affect the efficiency of the AEV. By doing this research, the team can make our AEV more energy efficient and thus more marketable.
Code for experiments
(see Programming Code)