My Design Project at VIT University

I have completed my design project final review today. First of all thanks to Mallikarjuna Reddy D sir, Professor belonging to Department of Design and Automation(SMEC) at VIT University.

D Mallikarjuna Reddy(SMEC)

This is my first post on this blog, I wanted to write somewhere on the internet about my Design Project so that I can remember this event in my life at any point of time. I am writing this post wholeheartedly. If you have any comment please feel free to discuss.

At my university every Mechanical Engineering Student will have to do a design project to become a Mechanical Engineer😛. So I have selected Design Project during my 6th semester(3rd Year). Because there are no particular number of seats allotted to particular faculty and thus my course was approved. This was a two credit course.

Design Project Course Approved

As I was really interested in Airplanes I chose Design of Aircraft Wing as my topic along with two other people Yeshwanth Kumar and Krishna Reddy as my group mates. I also went to Deepa mam and asked her whether she would be interested to be our internal guide. She accepted our request and we started off.

Our External Reviewer was Mallikarjuna Reddy. Soon after a few days I got a mail stating that we will be having our first review. I started preparing the report for our Review 1 and to be frank I just have read two to three articles on internet and used my previous knowledge on Aircrafts and completed the report.

Report 1. I used my Tex Skills to prepare the report and the output was awesome.

Review 1: On this day Krishna Reddy went to Deepa Madam and asked her what had to be included in the report so that in case if I have missed anything then I(we) can add it. She asked us to add some design data like what load we will be taking for our analysis and other parameters. I have made changes accordingly and we(Me and Krishna Reddy, Yeshwant went home for some reason) went to our reviewer. He just asked us a few questions like "What is the project?", "Why did we select this project?", "what will be our approach?" and some basic questions. He also told us that it is very hard to design an airfoil, and so we can download a airfoil and make some analysis. Finally he asked us to sign on a sheet and our Review1 was over.

Review 2: Actually we had these reviews, so that each time we had a review we will atleast do some work and at the end we will complete the project . So the required component in the report was that we had to show we had done some work. Until the day before the review I didn't knew what to do, because I also had Hardware project which has a different story. Finally the two other group mates searched a model on internet and found B737 wing. As I was good at Solidworks I added some forces and made simulation. This time Krishna Reddy prepared the report and they added the simulation results which I have generated. When we went to our reviewer his first question was,"What have you guys done?". Obviously it was my part to answer the question because the other two didn't knew anything about these concepts. I have explained him each and everything in the report using a Power Point Presentation and as he was satisfied with the work we have done. He said "Okay, you guys have done something.". I don't know whether other batches have done these kind of simulation but the sentence was really encouraging for me. I felt very happy for his encouragement and I wanted to do more for my final review. As we have added B737-8 which had a winglet, he asked us,"Why there is a need for winglet". Again I answered him with the turbulence and few other things which I had learnt seeing A380(My favorite Aircraft), B747, Air crash Investigation documentaries. He was satisfied, we signed on the attendance sheet and the design review 2 was over.

Report 2. Krishna Reddy simply copied everything from internet and from the previous report. His argument was that we had to add same thing from the previous report to make it a continuation for the next report.

Review 3(Today): As this was my final review Krishna Reddy and Yeswanth were worried and started asking me about this review 3-4 days before the review. Recently I have leaned Ansys in my CAD/CAM lab and I wanted to apply the concept to do flow analysis for the wing as we have already done Structural Analysis in the previous Review. I started searching on Youtube for Ansys Flow Simulation tutorials and found many. One of them was Fluent Ansys Analysis. I followed this tutorial and everything went fine until at the end the solidworks file of B737-8 wing was meshed and the fluent raised an error saying that I have exceeded the number of fluid cells. Because I was using a student version I had no other option but to make some changes in my design and meshing procedure to get the solution. Finally I tried doing the analysis in Solidworks but I didn't knew that it will take time for the system to generate the solution and I thought that this design will not work and I will have to redesign a new wing. And so I searched for the same and found  Ep.1 - How to build a wing in solidworks starting from coordinates. Finally I created two air foils using this tutorials and for one air foil I got solution using Ansys and for the other I had to get the solution using Solidworks because I was using Ansys Student. Again this time Krishna Reddy and Yeshwanth made the report and poster required for the review and we went to meet D Mallikarjuna Reddy Sir. He asked us to come to Design of machine Elements Lab(above Souvenir Shop). We went there and he asked us to just show the report so that he can ask us some questions regarding our project. His first question was, "What have you done till now?". Soon I gave a reply showing the NACA data that I(we) have designed the Aircraft wing. He was amused(may be) with my(our) work because what he thought was not possible for beginners(atleast for some students in our college) have been accomplished. I also showed him the velocity Streamlines, Pressure on Wing, Vorticity and few other things which I have done. I also explained him about the pattern I have observed. Actually when a streamline flows, at the start of the wing the velocity is reduced(because it is obstructed by an obstacle) after that at the wing surface the streamline again gains speed and at the end again there will be a reduction in the speed where the flaps are placed. I also told him that this might be the cause for the turbulence and vorticity. He really did like the effort I had put and he again encouraged me. This professor is really a great guy. Not because he had encouraged me, but if he hadn't encouraged me during the second review I wouldn't even have designed the air foil. 

Velocity streamlines over a wing(NACA2408)

He also encouraged me(us) that we had done some work and if we can do some more effort then we can publish a research paper. This encouragement really made me happy and I really felt confident.  

I think this kind of professors are really important for each and every student in their life. By using the term student means not the people who are just awaiting for the degree but are here to get some concept before they go out.
  
I will blog another post with the final project report which I have submitted to the reviewer so that it will not get messed up with this post.