Bronco Air eVTOL
Electric Vertical Take-off and Landing
Senior Design Capstone Project and VSF Design Build Vertically Fly Competition Team
June 2024 - June 2025
Aero-Structures Sub-team Lead | Systems Engineer | Co-Captain
Electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOLs) have been proposed as an alternative to common vertical take-off vehicles. They can perform the same functions, without the costs associated with a helicopter.
Bronco Air is a first year eVTOL team at Santa Clara University, created by five senior undergraduate students and I. We are leading the team in developing a conceptual design for an eVTOL which satisfies the requirements of the annual Vertical Flight Society’s Design-Vertical-Build-Fly Competition.
The next steps of the project will include further simulation and analysis, designing the payload dropping mechanism, finalizing material design matrices, and further developing the controls program. Long-term work includes manufacturing and testing of the aircraft in order to meet the competition deadline of April 1, 2025.
We focus our conceptual design on three subsystems: Propulsion, Airfoils and Controls. These subsystem designs are verified using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) techniques, as well as Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations.
Additionally, a preliminary control simulation using MATLAB/Simulink has been developed using these design choices.
