In an aircraft design class at Princeton, I proposed and managed a project of nine team members to come up with an initial design for a long-range powered glider/sailplane that would extend the world range record for flight to 30,000 miles (currently at 25,766 miles, held by the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer).

Essentially starting from first principles, we developed a constraint analysis for the mission, downselected critical parameters like wing loading and thrust/weight ratio, and derived the geometry of the aircraft. From there, we produced CAD models of our proposed plane and ran numerous computational fluid dynamics and structural analysis studies to verify resilience and compliance with FAA standards.

Throughout the course of the project, I developed an automated tool in MATLAB that iterates on given constraints to attempt to optimize the aircraft. Currently, I am working with a partner to expand this tool into multi-configuration automated aircraft design software for our senior thesis.