A delocalized international team of Graduate and Undergraduate students conceive, design, implement, and operate a 3 meterwingspan aircraftwith the intent to investigate numerous new ‘green’ aircraft technologies. The project, known as Hyperion, teach esessential systems engineering skills through long-distance design collaborations with multidisciplinary teams of engineering students located around the world.
First year project partners were the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA, the University of Sydney, Australia, and the University of Stuttgart, Germany. The teams on three continents are distributed 8 hours apart; students can relay select work daily so that progress can “Follow-The-Sun (FTS).”As a result three workdays are packaged in one 24 hour period.
The student teams operate as a single, independent entity; structuring themselves as a simulated industry operation. Thus, project management and systems engineering principles are learned through a real-world design and deliver experience.
The project also teaches delocalized manufacturing: select components are manufactured by each team and integrated both in Stuttgart and Colorado, giving the students an opportunity to learn multifaceted design for manufacturing. The project incubated many problems which lead to mitigation techniques for global collaborationas well as generating a better educated workforce to entermodernindustry.
In the second year the international collaboration was limited to students at the University of Stuttgart. The team analyzed technical deficiencies of the first generation Hyperion 1.0 aircraft, a flying wing, and redesigned the wings to criteria that make it a blended wing body aircraft. The team also implemented an autonomous flight control system.