CONTENTS
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AE 420: Aircraft Preliminary Design
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AE 421: Aircraft Detail Design
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AE 427: Spacecraft Preliminary Design
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AE 445: Spacecraft Detail Design
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M E 407: Preliminary Design for Robotics Systems
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ME 429: Propulsion System Preliminary Design
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ME 435: Energy Engineering Preliminary Design
AE 420: AIRCRAFT PRELIMINARY DESIGN
DOLPHIN Student Lead: André Leppert Student Team Members: Sydney Akana, Brandon Barkey, Gregory Covello, William Hays, Donald Higgs, Lucas Knoth, André Leppert, Jason Marsan, Michael Perales, Harpreet Saroya, Erik Skibsrud, Antonio Tosco, Barry Uchima Faculty: Dr. Johann Dorfling and Dr. Richard Mangum Project DOLPHIN is designing, fabricating, and testing an eVTOL aircraft to participate in the Design Build Vertical Fly (DBVF) competition in Maryland on April 7 – 10, 2026. The competition context is autonomous wildfire fighting. The aircraft will complete one ground mission and then three flight missions consecutively within a 10-minute flight window. The team is required to fly a 500-foot flight path and drop payload from the aircraft onto simulated fires. Sandbags filled with at least 0.5 pounds of sand represent the payload and will be dropped from an altitude of 30 feet AGL. Throughout the flight missions, the team will retrieve more sandbags from different waypoints to drop onto two target zones (fires) both manually and autonomously. To complete the flight missions, the team is building three separate aircraft throughout the design process to compete in the competition. The team is verifying the aerodynamic model with hand calculation methods and aerodynamic simulations. Autonomous flight and control is being verified with an off-the-shelf quadcopter. Payload delivery and retrieval tests are used to prove the system design, and static thrust tests are being performed to verify propulsion system selection.
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SENIOR CAPSTONE PROJECTS
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