About
Fixed Wing is a project within AeroNU (Northeastern’s largest aerospace club) dedicated to fixed wing aircraft. I joined my first semester freshman year and was a member up until I graduated. After my freshman year, the previous project leads left and I was chosen as the next project lead alongside one of my friends and I was project lead up until I graduated.
Project Lead
In AeroNU, each project has a project lead or two. These project leads are responsible for the budgeting, project proposals, and general organization of the project. While I was project lead, I was able to 4x membership within a year, and maintained or increased that every year since then. Being project lead was my favorite thing I did while at Northeastern because not only did I learn a lot, but I was also able to share what I learned with others as well.
eVTOL
Voltage Regulator
Given that our plane was to run off of LiPo or Li-ion batteries, we needed some way to step down the voltage to power the servos, flight controller, radio, and other various electronics. Although there are many OTS options, I wanted to test my abilities, and learn more by designing my own. The final design was capable of outputting 5V at 10A for sustained periods using the Vicor PI3302-00 chip. It ended up working spectacularly and flew flights on our testbed plane.
Carbon Fiber
Part of what made making this plane so difficult was we wanted to make the plane out of as much custom carbon fiber layups as possible, something none of our members, myself included, had done before. Our first attempts were pretty rough around the edges, literally and figuratively.
However, after many attempts and adjustments to our processes, we were able to create spectacular parts, that required minimal once the epoxy was cured.
We also developed methods for embedding a strip of Kevlar before applying epoxy to allow us to have a living hinge for control surfaces.
Ben Veghte 