FURI | Spring 2020

How Control Surface Sizing Affects an Aircraft Stability and Preformance

The motivation behind this project is to explore how the sizing of an aircraft’s control surface affects its stability and performance. Multiple tail configurations were created and analyzed using Vorlax. The data was then processed in Excel to calculate key frequencies and relationships between variables. Solving the sizing and stability problem of an aircraft is not straight forward and allows for many different styles all of which may work well.  A factor that influences the stability and design of aircraft is the amount of range that the center of gravity can be in. Future work could be doing a study on how the different aircraft frequencies affect the pilot’s ability to control it.