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Syllabus
A&AE 451 Aircraft Design
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SYLLABUS [Course Description] |
OTHER A&AE 451 PAGES |
Course Description
This course
will offer students the opportunity to conduct a series of aircraft system
design studies, starting from a basic opportunity description. Students will work in teams to identify
customers, establish a basic business case, develop the system requirements,
conduct trade studies and sizing to determine the most promising aircraft
design, and complete a conceptual design of the aircraft, with as much detail
as time permits. The course will be
conducted in a manner that will replicate actual industry conceptual design studies
as closely as possible.
During the Spring 2009
semester, the class will focus upon describing a small supersonic transport
aircraft with an Initial Operational Capability in 2020. More details are available on the design
project page.
Course Goals
The course is
intended to help you to:
- deepen your knowledge of topics
relevant to aircraft systems
- identify and formulate the design
requirements for an aircraft
- describe an aircraft design that
is likely to meet the set of requirements
- use modern engineering tools to
complete the design process
- apply engineering knowledge and
skills acquired in previous classes to the design problem
- solve problems as part of a team
- effectively communicate by giving
oral presentations and writing technical reports required of design
engineers
Policies
Attendance
The University
Regulations Handbook reads: "Students are expected to be present for
every meeting of the classes in which they are enrolled." Regular
attendance will not be taken, but if you must miss a class you are responsible
for the lecture material, assignments and/or announcements made.
Campus Emergencies
In the event of a major campus emergency, course requirements, deadlines and grading percentages are subject to changes that may be necessitated by a revised semester calendar or other circumstances. Information about these changes will be available from the schedule page, via my e-mail (crossley(at) purdue.edu) or my office phone (765-496-2872).
Grading
There
are two types of graded items for the course: major design deliverables and
progress items
Major Design
Deliverables
There are
three major "deliverables" envisioned for this class. As the semester proceeds, time available may
dictate some changes in these deliverables.
- a presentation for the System
Requirement Review (SRR) and accompanying written document that covers the
market analysis, proposed design mission, and generated design
requirements for the small supersonic transport aircraft
- a presentation for the System
Definition Review (SDR) and accompanying written document of the selected
concept for the aircraft
- a presentation for the Conceptual
Design Review (CDR) and accompanying written document that describes the
aircraft design
Each of these
deliverables will be graded by the instructor and teaching assistant. The contribution of each of these
deliverables to the final score will follow the distribution shown below. The
relative importance increases with each assignment to reflect that the content
of each assignment becomes more complex.
Progress Items
In addition
to these three major deliverables, a “progress” score contributes a small
portion towards the final course grade.
To help keep teams moving forward through the design project, the
instructor will assign progress items that the teams will present to the
instructor and teaching assistant during an identified lab period. These progress items will appear on the
schedule page on the dates they are due.
The instructor will assign a progress score based upon how close teams
are to having the item completed. For
each progress item, the student team needs to identify a team member with
responsibility for that item. Team
members should have a reasonably even distribution of items for which they are
responsible.
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Grade Distribution |
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System
Requirement Review Presentation and Document |
20% |
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System
Definition Review Presentation and Document |
30% |
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Conceptual
Design Review Presentation and Document |
35% |
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Progress
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15% |
Base Grade and Merit
Pool
A base
grade will be assigned to the team as a whole. Because this is a team
project, there is often great concern about the "unfairness" of
assigning one grade to all team members, especially when some of the group
members feel that they have been conducting a disproportionately large portion
of the work. To try to resolve some of these issues, a "merit pool
approach" will be used to assign the final grades for the course.
For the "merit pool
approach" to assigning grades, an analogy is made between the A&AE 451
design teams and aerospace industry design groups. When working in industry,
engineers are rewarded with money (they get paid for their work). In the
university class, students are rewarded with a grade. Engineers usually receive
a "salary", and at the end of the year or after completion of a major
project, they often receive a "raise". One way that these raises are
often distributed is through a "merit pool" increase. A block of
money is allocated to the team, and then the team's manager and/or members
decide how much each team member is awarded as his or her raise.
Here is an example of how
this will work to assign individual grades for the A&AE 451 course:
A
team of five students has worked on the mission definition / system
requirements review and document. When they complete each the review and turn
in their written document to the instructor, they will also turn in that
group's decision as to how the merit pool should be distributed for this
deliverable. In this group, the following distribution has been turned in:
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Team Member |
Merit Pool |
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Student A |
30 % |
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Student B |
25 % |
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Student C |
20 % |
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Student D |
15 % |
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Student E |
10 % |
Now,
the instructor assigns a final grade based upon the teams review presentations
and written design proposal. For this example, the proposal score was an 89.
Then, each team member receives the "base pay" of 74, fifteen (15)
points less than the overall score. The available merit pool for this team is
75 points (15 points multiplied by five team members). With this "base
pay" grade and the merit pool distribution, scores are assigned to each
team member equal to the sum of the base grade and each member's share of the
merit pool:
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Team Member |
Base Grade |
Merit Pool Grade |
Individual Grade |
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Student A |
74.00 |
22.50 |
96.50 |
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Student B |
74.00 |
18.75 |
92.75 |
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Student C |
74.00 |
15.00 |
89.00 |
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Student D |
74.00 |
11.25 |
85.25 |
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Student E |
74.00 |
7.50 |
81.50 |
This is a different approach
to traditional grading of group assignments, and it provides some opportunity
for abuse by irresponsible team members. Because of this, the instructor will
still retain ultimate authority over assigning the final grades.
Course Materials
Textbook
Raymer, D.,
Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach, Fourth Edition, AIAA Education Series,
2004.
Dan
Raymer is a Purdue graduate who wrote this book based on his
"real-life" experience working in aircraft design and continuing
experiences as a well known consultant and instructor of aircraft design
courses. This will likely be one of the textbooks you will want to keep after
you are finished with AAE 451.
also see the links and
resources page