Engineering

Reaction paper
A successful engineering design must follow its own process. There are 5 steps in the engineering design process, the first step is “Needs assessment”, second is “Problem formulation”, the third named “Abstraction and synthesis”, the fourth called “Analysis” and the last is “Implementation”. In this reaction, I will show you why the Wright Brother can design the Manned Flignt successfully.

In 1900, the Wrights designed and constructed a 52-pound glider with a wing-span of 17.5 feet and a camber of only 1/23(recall that lift is essentially proportional to camber), this is the first Needs assessment. They flew this first glider as a kite, and then, they used some equation and various data and knew that the amount of lift that would be applied to their gilder. According to these calulations, the glider should have been able to lift 192 pounds in a 25-mile-per-hour airstream with a 3°angle of attack θ. That is the second part of the engineering design: Problem formulation. This step tell us that we need to consider a problem as a formulation, though the formulation and many kinds of data, we can improve our design. So the Wright brothers figured out from the formular that they must control pitch, roll and yaw.

The third part is “Abstraction and synthesis”, is tells us that we should have the ability which can solve the problem from other part of the design. For example, the Wright recognized that a human pilot would need to control a heavier-than-air craft about all three axes of rotation: roll, pitch, and yaw. So the Wright brothers installed a flat horizontal surface on the front of their glider to act as an elevator. By properly raising or lowering this elevator, the pilot could control rotation about the pitch axis rather than simply allowing the angle of angle of attack to be determined by the relative movement of the CL. Next, the Wrights discovered a way to control rotation about the roll axis. Rather than simplyshifting their bodies to...