Would This Fly?

Inspiration

Have you ever wondered whether a new wing design would actually fly before spending money building and testing it?That was the idea behind Would This Fly? We wanted to create a way to test wing designs virtually and get an idea of whether they could generate enough lift to fly. Instead of having to build a physical prototype first, our project lets users experiment with their designs and see how they perform under different conditions.

What it does

Would This Fly? simulates how a wing behaves in the air and estimates whether the design can generate enough lift to support its weight.Users can experiment with things like wing size, shape, airspeed, and other aerodynamic properties. The program then uses the physics of flight to estimate the resulting forces and determine whether the design is likely to fly.The goal isn't to replace real-world testing, but to give people a quick and inexpensive way to identify promising designs before building a physical prototype.

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we turned a complicated real-world engineering problem into something people can experiment with on a computer. Instead of immediately spending time and money building multiple physical prototypes, a user can first test different ideas virtually and determine which designs are worth investigating further.We're also proud that the project is based on actual aerodynamic principles rather than simply guessing whether a design will work.

What we learned

We learned that engineering is often about finding the right balance between accuracy, complexity, and usability. We also learned how many different variables affect flight. Changing something as simple as the wing's size or speed can significantly change the amount of lift produced because velocity is squared in the lift equation. Most importantly, we learned that simulations can be extremely useful for testing ideas before committing to expensive or time-consuming physical experiments.

What's next for Would This Fly?

Built With

• aerodynamics
• pyqt6
• python