Hi everyone, I decided to make this post today in response to some questions I received regarding my initial design choices and plans for the airplane later on. You can see my original reply in the previous post, but I wanted to elaborate here.
When I first began working on this project the first step involved deciding between building a monoplane or a biplane. I went with the former since I'll have one less wing to worry about while also getting less drag production during flight. Once I had gotten that out of the way, I looked over some already-existing plane designs online for inspiration, both full-scale versions and RC aircraft made by hobbyists (mostly Cessna 172's and WWI fighters like the Fokker Eindecker series). As a result, parameters like the height, length, and aspect ratio of the wings are loosely based off of such planes.
When it comes to the power plant, I haven't yet decided on a specific engine to use, but I am pretty sure that it will be electric due to the lower maintenance necessary and lighter weight than gasoline engines. Power generation also won't be an issue with electric engines, since I did some very basic research and found that the average power they outputted went well above the minimum requirements for flight I previously calculated. Hopefully I did my math right.
I'll then be modeling the plane in CATIA and running aerodynamic sims on it with ANSYS, making whatever changes are necessary and iterating on that process. Once I have a design I'm happy with, I'll be using an Original Prusa i3 MK2S with silver PLA filament (1.75mm nozzle) to print out and construct the airplane. That's the plan so far, with updates coming soon.
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