Job title: Electrical Design Engineer
Work period: 2009 - 2010
Work location: Poland
Propulsion system design and prototyping for an electric glider.
Worked from the very early stage of the initial design of the machine.
Representing Wamtechnik company I was tasked with aiding Politechnika Warszawska in providing glider with a battery pack and propulsion system.
We designed two types of battery packs:
1. A standard box design which could be installed in the fuselage
2. An elastic battery array installed in the wings.
Did multiple tests on both battery types. The Box design was easy and cheap to manufacture. However, its location was problematic as such a heavy component was posing severe balancing issues.
The wing battery array posed a very challenging engineering issue due to the glider’s high wing flex, the battery had to be constructed with tightly packaged cells linked with flexible connections allowing for up to 5-degree flex between cells, more than 35-degree flex on the span of the wing. This design was superior and eventually was chosen for the final product.
The engine chosen was a 30KW Sineton A37K015 unit. It proved to be a very powerful and reliable unit with one of the best power-to-weight ratios available at that time.
The glider design was finalized in 2012 after a successful flight test. Till 2014 some minor technical issues were taken care of and the overall protoype design refined. The final design was unveiled to the public in 2014 at Kompozyt Expo in Cracow.
AOS-71 design log page
AOS-71 wikipedia page