Flying Car Fluid Dynamics

This project was completed for partial fulfillment of my Thermal Fluids Design course at Wayne State University. Flying cars may sound silly to you, I would have to agree, but my professor required the class to projects related to flying cars. My teams goal was to develop a buoyancy system to reduce the required lift for the flying car, to hopefully make flying cars more realistic. Our design basically turned into a rotorcraft with a hot air balloon on it. Overall, the concept of this project isn't the best but I feel like my technical writing, analysis, and leadership skills are showcased here.

In this project my main contributions were leadership and technical analysis. I have developed a complex spreadsheet that was basically a calculator for our team to get graphs and values that defined the design. I also handled all of the CFD simulations and design verification. I was often in charge of delegating work and structuring how our team would work together. I also managed the report, such as being a designated proofreading and formatting everything. But overall, I feel that my greatest contributions this project were leadership and developing the methodology and technical analysis used in this project and giving the team direction in general. I also wrote about 90% of the report.

We tested buoyancy systems consisting of different buoyant gasses, materials, and sizes to find the optimal design. I have included the report for this project below: