Aeronautical Engineering Capstone Design at the University of Arizona

This paper describes the development and impact of an aeronautical engineering capstone design course sequence taught by an adjunct who works professionally in aerospace concept design. The goal of this course is to produce graduating students that can balance creativity and analysis to produce viable designs. Although the basic syllabus from earlier years was retained, the implementation of the course elements was revised: 1) to emphasize computational methods for Multi-Disciplinary Optimization, 2) to expose students to primary-source classical material, 3) to familiarize students with primary-source government specifications (MIL and FAR standards) and, 4) to develop an understanding that the final product of aircraft design is not just the flight article, but includes the scheduled performance per the aircraft flight manual. The ability to teach “visualization” of aircraft design as an analogy to the creation of a photographic image is explored in this paper. Examples from both the capstone lecture series and the associated student projects will be discussed.