im not sure if this is relevant to your question, but my first year uni project, was to design and construct a wing 500mm in length from a limited supply of balsa wood, that was to be as light as possible, and then put through the following tests
1) once clamped to a workbench the wing was to be loaded up with a kilogram loading acting above the wingtip, and then below
2) the wing is to be then put into a jig where it is put then through a torsional test of +/- 10 degrees
if the wing passes both of these tests, it is then moved to the final test
3) the wing is moved back to the workbench clamp and then loaded up to destruction
the winning wing, is the one that achieves the highest performance ratio, which is the maximum mass achieved during loading (in grams) divided by the weight of the wing in grams
now onto my point, our design involved a simple ish geodetic lattice, and we found that from balsa wood, and glued with pva! that it was incredibly strong. though it barely passed the torsional test (took 4kg of load to move it through 10 degrees!!!) our final loading test resulted in us taking the record for the highest weight taken, at 10.5kg!!! giving a performance ratio 190.9 (our wing weighed 55g)
as it is, we encountered all the problems described above, it took our group twice as long as any other to finish our prototype, the carving of strips of balsa literally took hours and hours, as we’ve said the wing really did not want to twist at all, and did not show any signs of the load applied (ie beinding) until we had applied almost 8 kg. at the end of the day, we won, with our geodetic design, but it took us three prototype wings to perfect our design, the inital prototype was a catastrophic failure, it failed at only 2 kg of loading partly due to our building methods and an unforseen flaw in our design.
my conclusions really were that it is a lot of effort to design and build a geodetic lattice, as we found out at first, get the design wrong and the results are catastrophic.
once your design is right, again, the construction is incrediby laborious and difficult in assembly. generally the finished product is incredibly strong (as can be seen by our test conclusions) though was unwilling to flex in most directions.
Cheers
Ben
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