A team of Lehigh undergraduates won first place in the team presentation and design category in the Boeing Flight Competition, held in conjunction with the National Society of Black Engineers 49th Annual Convention.
The team—mechanical engineers Zemichael Gebeyehu ’24, Mika Asfaw ’24, and Yafet Menjetta ’23 and computer science and electrical engineering double major Amir Jemal ’23—traveled to Kansas City, MO, in late March with a larger delegation of Lehigh students attending the NSBE convention.
“Overall, the competition was a great opportunity for us to interact with other engineering students as well as Boeing engineers and learn a lot from their experiences,” says Gebeyehu, the team’s captain, who is also lead systems engineer for the Lehigh University Space Initiative. “It’s a great hands-on opportunity for students to design and build gliders, while practicing the fundamentals of aircraft design.”
He says the team’s glider had the largest wingspan in the competition “to increase the glide ratio” and incorporated a “dihedral angle for roll stability.” They used a laser cutter in Wilbur Powerhouse to cut the components for the glider, bonded components with epoxy adhesives, and manually sanded the wings “to have a high-lift cambered airfoil.”
The judges “really liked our methods of optimizing our glider design through various Computer Aided Engineering methods (CAE) as well as back-the-envelope calculations,” says Gebeyehu. “Our custom, manually manufactured airfoils for the wings made us stand out from other gliders.”
This was the team’s second year participating in the Boeing Flight Competition, he says, and the feedback they received from the judges will help them prepare for next year’s event.
“Our goal for next year is to fine-tune our design for more performance, as well as conduct more testing to support our design decisions.”
