Paper Helicopter Experiment Karla Valenzuela & José Carlos Miranda Page 1 of 3

Paper Helicopter Experiment

Introduction


Customers of CHC (Cellulose Helicopter Company) have been complaining about the limited flight time of CHC
helicopters as the one shown in Figure 1. A team of CHC engineers, pilots, managers and field representatives is
formed to study how the standard CHC helicopter design might be modified to prolong the flight time without
deterioration in stability and flying capacity.

A large number of factors that might affect the flight time are proposed during a brainstorming session, but the list
is finally limited to 7 factors which are to be studied through a full factorial experiment.

Figure 1. Paper helicopter.

Design objective

The task is to plan, run, analyze and document a factorial experiment with the aim to improve the CHC helicopter
construction to prolong the flight time. Due to the low cost of the prototypes, the company wants to obtain the
maximum information possible for the design, and therefore a full factorial design is selected. Since flight time may
be affected by different noncontrollable factors, five repetitions of each experiment will be carried out.

This task involves building 128 prototypes and performing 640 experiments. It is estimated that 100 person-hours
are required to complete it.

All the raw materials needed to build the prototypes will be provided.

Deliverables

At this stage of the process, your task is to build the prototypes, carry out the experiments and report back the
results to CHC Engineering office. The factors and levels to be considered are shown in
Paper Helicopter Experiment Karla Valenzuela & José Carlos Miranda Page 2 of 3

Table 1 and other parameters required to build the prototypes are described in Table 2. Team 1 will use the first
values for wing length (65 and 85), Team 2 the second ones (85 and 105), and Team 3 the third ones (105 and
125). Similarly for Body Length and Body Width.

Figure 2 shows how each experiment should be performed in still-air conditions launching the helicopters from the
area in the top floor of Aulas 1 building.

Table 1. Selected factors and levels for the design.

Factor − +

Material Bond Opaline

Wing Length 65/85/105 85/105/125

Body Length 60/80/100 80/100/120

Body Width 30/38/46 38/46/54

Paper Clips 1 3

Folded Wings No Yes

Taped Wings No Yes

Table 2. Other parameters for the design.

Parameters Dimension

Wing Width 50 mm

Middle Body Height 25 mm

Fold Offset 5 mm

Fold Tilt 75º

Body Layers 1

Taped Body No

Tape Width Standard

Spin Direction Clockwise

Paper Helicopter Experiment Karla Valenzuela & José Carlos Miranda Page 3 of 3

Figure 2. Testing of the helicopter.

Evaluation

The grade of the team will be the result of the evaluation of the quality of the prototypes built and the quality of
the data gathered.

Engineering Team

Each team will have 5 members.

Recommendations

The site www.paperhelicopterexperiment.com has very valuable information about factors, parameters and how to
build a helicopter. It also has some routines to automatically generate the templates to build the paper helicopters
according to the desired experimental design. It can save much time.

Questions?

If you have questions or comments about the project, please post them on the course space in Schoology.