High school student trying to build the fastest drone in the world
Hi, I’m in high school and I’m building a high speed drone with the end goal of getting the world record for fastest drone ever. I’ve been working on this for about a year. I’m looking for people with engineering experience (especially CFD, composites, machining and electrical) who’d be willing to answer a few questions I have or even hop on a call for a few minutes.
Although I’ve been doing engineering projects since I was very young, this one has been much harder, because I put a lot of effort into learning the math and theory necessary to do CFD simulations properly. I went through Fundamentals of Aerodynamics and the Finite Volume Method: an advanced introduction. I also did the FEA part of the Cornell EDX Ansys course. More recently, I did part of the 2 week introduction to Openfoam (on wiki.openfoam.com).
The end goal is not only to build the fastest drone ever, but more importantly to run aerostructural optimizations to figure out what the actual optimal design is. To me, this is the really interesting part of the project and over the summer, I’m going to try to set up an aerostructural optimization pipeline using DaFoam.
In addition, I recently got access to several places with different 3 axis CNCs. My end goal is to create the drone body out of carbon fiber and not 3d print it. Thanks to the CNCs, I’ll be able to machine molds and resin infuse the carbon fiber (I already have all the equipment for that).
CAD-wise, thanks to the student licenses, I went through tons of different softwares: fusion first, then solidworks, then Siemens NX (did Xcelerator academy courses), then Catia. The latest version was made in Fusion (so that I have a CAD I can easily modify when machining). I’m planning on making the final design in Catia (great surfaces and the design can be fully parametric and not break unlike with fusion and solidworks).
The problem I’m facing at the moment is that I have developed a lot of skills very fast but in this small amount of time I obviously didn’t develop a very deep understanding (I mean I can’t replicate a Master’s doing Aerospace and CFD…) Additionally, I have spent a huge amount of time learning and doing courses which means I have less and less time to actually build, test and tune the drone.
There are many areas where I have very little knowledge. If I try to fill those gaps by going through more textbooks, I won’t have time to build the actual drone. That’s why help from people with experience would be incredibly helpful. Unfortunately, there are parts of engineering you just can’t google.
On another note, I was also thinking of sharing parts of the project here. Watching the videos from the other record holders was incredibly helpful and if I can do the same, that would be incredible.
Edit:
For anyone interested in the official record, it's fastest battery powered quadcopter ground speed. The record is set at around 660km/h by Luke and Mike Bell who have been competing with Ben and the guys at Droneprohub (they got an insane top speed of around 690km/h).