Support the 2020 SAE Aero Design Team

The Lawrence Technological SAE Aero Design Team is charged with the goal of designing, building, and flying a heavy lift remote control aircraft. The team has been competing in the SAE Aero Design competition for over ten years. The competition this year takes place in Fort Worth, Texas where the 2020 team will face off against other universities across the globe. As a team we hope to reach a new goal of placing in the top 10 at competition!

The Project

The Blue Devil Motorsports SAE Aero Design Team is a student-run project team that relies on support from donors like you to fabricate a large-scale remote control plane! Each year, schools from across the world gather to compete for the best performing plane. By supporting our team, you will be providing us engineering students with the ability to compete against top universities from across the globe. This past year, our 2019 team participated in the competition in Van Nuys, California where we placed 13th overall!  We have high ambitions for next year and are working at breaking that top 10 threshold. In order to do this, we plan to redesign the main structure and passenger bay of the fuselage, allowing for a greater payload. These improvements will be revolutionary for our team, but we can't do it without the support and sponsorship of our community and local suppliers.  

The Students

Our team works together for approximately over a year to design and build a competition-ready airplane. This requires the team to put in hundreds of design and building hours. The project requires students to problem solve and think outside the box, taking the theory learned in the classroom and putting it into practice. Relevant coursework includes Statics and Mechanics of Materials, Fluid Mechanics, Circuits and Electronics, and Aeronautical Engineering Fundamentals.

What Next?

Our 2020 plane will be the most advanced plane the LTU Aero Design team has ever built. Due to major competition rule changes this year, our team will construct a fuselage with a trapezoidal cross-section, the first-ever to be built by LTU. The trapezoid design minimizes external surface area while maximizing payload capacity. Additional improvements to this year's competition plane include redesigned landing gear, a completely new wing design with greater lift capacity, and a larger propeller to generate greater thrust. Power supply constraints still mandate a 1000 watt limit; however, the 2020 competition plane will outfit a motor that produces more torque to spin the larger propeller while consuming less energy.

The Competition

The SAE Aero Design Competition is the time for each aero design team from across the world to compete with the plane they have spent hundreds of hours creating. The competition includes a series of flight rounds where the planes must carry as many soccer balls and as much cargo (steel weights) as possible. In previous years, tennis balls were used to simulate passengers of commercial airlines; thus, a new strategy is required to compete with the new competition requirements.