Eng'g students design, fly 3D-printed plane

Up, up and away! Engineering students at the University of Virginia have designed and built a working plane using a 3-D printer.

 

The project stemmed from a video of a 3-D-printed plastic turbofan engine that the students posted on video-sharing site YouTube last spring.

 

“It was sort of a seat-of-the-pants thing at first – wham, bang. But we kept banging away and became more confident as we kept designing and printing out new parts,” said Steven Easter, one of the builders of the plane, according to a news release by the university.

 

The plane, with a 6.5-foot wingspan, was made from assembled printed parts, with the students putting in 80-hour workweeks, "with many long nights in the lab."

 

It is only the third 3-D printed plane known to have been built and flown, the University of Virginia said.

 

Easter had responded to an announcement from The MITRE Corp., a federally funded research and development center, that it was looking for two summer interns to work on a new project involving 3-D printing.

 

Saying he was curious about what the firm had to offer, he got a last-minute interview and brought with him his brother and lab partner Jonathan Turman.

 

The 3D-printed plane turned out to be part of a Department of the Army project to study the feasibility of using such planes, the University of Virginia said.

 

With help from adviser, mechanical and aerospace engineering professor David Sheffler, the two eventually produced the plane. Sheffler was quoted in the release as saying he had confidence in them “the entire way.”

 

Test flights

 

In four test flights were held in August and early September at Milton Airfield near Keswick, the plane attained a cruising speed of 45 mph.

 

During the first test, the plane’s nosepiece was damaged while the plane taxied around the field. Easter said they "dogged" it.

 

For his part, Sheffler said 3-D printing has an advantage in that it lets students evolve their parts and make changes on the fly.

 

He also said the technology lets students take on complex design projects that previously were impractical.

 

“To make a plastic turbofan engine to scale five years ago would have taken two years, at a cost of about $250,000. But with 3-D printing we designed and built it in four months for about $2,000," he said.

 

"This opens up an arena of teaching that was not available before. It allows us to train engineers for the real challenges they will face in industry,” he added. — TJD, GMA News