Research of correlation between aspect ratio and descent rate-Based on paper-plane using experiment

The aspect ratio is important to airplane performance because it affects the aircrafts performance by changing the geometry of the aerofoil, which affects the lift the aerofoil can generate. An experiment of testing 5 planes with different wing aspect ratio has performed in order to figure out the relationship between aspect ratio and descent rate. The experiment is based on small scale model. Before the experiment, analysis based on physics computation show some advantage of small scale model. The wing of the model airplane is made of paper, and the fuselage is made from paperboard. The plane is released at a certain height by a rubber band which allow the plane to glide. Finally, the experiment shows that although the increase in aspect ratio can improve the performance of the plane, the performance will get worst as aspect ratio increases after a critical aspect ratio. Computation of the average descent rate and comparison in gliding distance of different wing aspect ratio obtained by the experiments show the optimal value of AR is 5.1.