The BUT Chicken Wings flight team from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering has had a very successful year. In September 2018, four years after the team’s inception, the young designers came first in the international New Flying Competition in Germany. Afterwards, the ambitious students from Brno joined forces with their colleagues from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague and together they took part in the Air Cargo Challenge 2019.
Photo: archive of BUT Chicken Wings
In the air, a wingspan of five metres, on the ground, just under a metre. It was this reduction of the wingspan along with an original crank gear developed by the Brno students from the BUT Chicken Wings team that most impressed experts from the jury of the international New Flying Competition. The competition is organised by the Airbus and Lufthansa companies in collaboration with the Neues Fliegen e.V. students’ association from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.
“The assignment was difficult in that it offered several alternative solutions. We spent the first weeks of work drawing sketches, making calculations and testing our theoretical presumptions. In the end we decided to develop an original mechanism that makes it possible to fold the wings of the aircraft alongside the body after landing. The crank mechanism that also uses the supporting struts as kinematic members is capable of reducing the wingspan from five metres during takeoff to 0.92 metres while parked,” explained Filip Stanislav, head of the Wing section and student of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering.
In designing the mechanism of the aircraft named Shark the students primarily concentrated on the maximum wingspan reduction as this criterion had the greatest weight during the assessment. “The method of wingspan reduction developed by us does not simultaneously increase the other dimensions of the aircraft, i.e. length and height. The complicated nature of our mechanism mainly consists in the necessity of precisely observing the positions of all moving parts and achieving sufficient rigidity. In case of any imperfections the designed motion kinematics ceases to work and the forces in all the components of the mechanism start to increase. This technical solution caught the attention of the technical commission and helped us win the competition,” said the body designer Jan Rohánek.
The competition in Hamburg was also attended by teams from Germany, Mexico, China and Azerbaijan who all presented their aircraft. “We had an opportunity to study the advantages and pitfalls of the different solutions. The climax of the whole four-day event was two competition flights. In the first the teams showed the performance characteristics of the aircraft. Chicken Wings proved its qualities and came first far ahead of their competitors. The second flight concentrated mostly on the resistance of the structure under the prescribed loading of +3G in a sine-wave flight three times in a row,” explained head of the team and pilot Tomáš Trojánek. Although the team ended up with a minor penalty in the second flight, in the end BUT Chicken Wings celebrated overall victory.
Photo: archive of BUT Chicken Wings
Thousands of work hours from the initial sketch to the test flight
The twenty-strong team of students at the Institute of Aerospace Engineering of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering devoted the complete academic year 2017/2018 to designing and building the aircraft. “The preparations were quite strenuous. We worked on the concept of the aircraft during the courses and outside of them and spent almost all weekends building the aeroplane. The greatest challenge was the complexity of the collapsing mechanism which required the utmost precision in the making of all component parts, and last but not least the financial aspect of the project. To build Shark we used composite materials, plywood, balsa and aerospace aluminium alloys,” added Tomáš Trojánek.
Invigorated by the new experience and success the team set out to prepare for the new season. There was quite a few changes. The quintessential one was an expansion of the team, which so far had a base only among the students of the Faculty of Mechanical of Engineering in Brno, to include students of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. From the original five founding members the team grew to up to eighteen working at Brno University of Technology and six new members active in the Czech Technical University in Prague. Together they started to prepare for the Air Cargo Challenge international competition which was held this year in August in Stuttgart, Germany.
The competition involved 27 teams and Chicken Wings with their concept of the new aircraft called FausT came 7th in the end. Just four days before departure for the race the team members had to face a grave problem – during final training the aircraft suffered fatal damage and the young designers had to build it again. There was exactly 96 hours between the destruction of the aircraft and the repeated maiden flight. In Stuttgart FausT successfully passed the technical inspection and in the race flights it finally claimed 7th place among international competition. The designers are particularly proud of their own system of weight loading which was among the best and they are determined to come back next year and win.
BUT Chicken Wings
The student team was established at the Institute of Aerospace Engineering at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of Brno University of Technology in 2014. In each academic year the team designs and builds a model of a small pilotless aircraft with which the young designers take part in a selected international competition. The team consists of about 20 students who devote their free time to the project. The principal aim of the competitions is to develop theoretical and practical skills of aerospace engineers early during their university study. The students work on the projects for free outside their school duties and they are helped in covering the cost of building the aircraft by sponsors.