Vision-2010 SAE Aero Design
The Aero Design part of SAE International’s (www.sae.org) Collegiate Design Series, is a competition intended to provide undergraduate and graduate engineering students with a real-life engineering exercise.
The Aero Design® Competition challenges engineering students to conceive, design, fabricate, and test a radio controlled aircraft that can take off and land with the maximum payload.The competition has been designed to provide exposure to the kinds of situations that engineers face in the real work environment. First and foremost a design competition, students will find themselves performing trade studies and making compromises to arrive at a design solution that will optimally meet the mission requirements while still conforming to the configuration limitations.
The importance of interpersonal communication skills is sometimes overlooked, yet both written and oral communication skills are vital in the engineering workplace. To help teams develop these skills, a high percentage of a team's score is devoted to the design report and the oral presentation required in the competition.
Aero Design features three classes of competition—Regular, Open, and Micro. Regular Class is intended to be simpler than Open Class, and therefore more accessible to the fledgling team. Open Class is intended to be less restrictive than Regular Class, thereby opening a larger potential solution set. Its lack of restriction allows teams to pursue more complex vehicle configurations, thereby encouraging greater creativity in satisfying the mission requirements. Micro Class teams are required to make trades between two potentially conflicting requirements, carrying the highest payload fraction possible, while simultaneously pursuing the lowest empty weight possible.