Research Trip

We recent went on a research trip to the DeHavilland Museum and Denham airport to get up close and personal with a couple of Chipmunks.

Our main focus was gathering data on the cockpit and for this we utilised photogrametry. This is a powerful algorithm that studies geometry from hundreds of photographs and generates 3D data. The key is in the photos you input and the way you gather them has a direct impact on the quality of data it is able to produce. It often takes several hours to get enough photos of a cockpit but this is time well spent as it can reduce design time by several days.

Once you have the 3D data you then need to carefully scale and position it within the CAD environment and use it like tracing paper to map the parametric data over the top. Unfortunately the data directly from photogrametry is much too messy to use. We also need to adjust shapes and thicknesses in order to make the design ready for manufacture.