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Fanwing Planes?
waimate writes "Up until now, there's been fixed wing, or there's been rotating wing, and that's it. But now thanks to Patrick Peebles, there's an entirely new principle of flight called the Fanwing. Initially developed in secrecy and flown only at night, as reported in this Bulletin article this machine combines the many of the attributes of helicopters and conventional aircraft, but not by combining the worst aspects of both like the V-22 Osprey. The FanWing is a whole new way of getting off the ground, particularly suited to inner city applications. It's only downfall (he he) is that it lacks any ability to glide in the event of an engine outage. Includes videos of the prototype in action."
according to the FAQ they are working on this, and seem confident that they'll be able to get it to work well enough for a reasonable emergency landing.
Now, the scary part is that I wrote a report on this maniac/genius back in high school and I remembered his name so I could google for it...
Money for nothing, pix for free
</KARMA>
Money for nothing, pix for free
Google's caching of the primary pages wasn't very helpful. Too many frames and redirects to go through to get to a page that had any real information.
Try Google's Images to get at least an idea of what we're talking about.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
some images of the plane on google
I managed to grab a couple videos from the (lagging from the start) site before the webserver came to a grinding halt. The R/C models fly nicely, they have impressive stability, especially at low speeds (in fact, it looks like speed matters less than with traditional wings).
They make buzzing noises, a tad like mosquitoes.
From the article title, I thought this was about the "rotating fans" lifting-body aircraft I had read about a few years ago in specialized press... At least the one in this article does not look like a UFO.
I haven't seen the article yet (slashdotted, natch), so cut me some slack.
But they could use an emergancy parachute system in case of failure.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There are no manned prototypes as yet, but the article suggests cropdusting, cargo, and people transportation. One of the mentions it has is that a 200hp engine could lift about two tons, albeit at only 100kph.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
i.e. it has propellers on the wings, just like the pinion feathers on the wings of a bird. It fles like a bird, therefore.
Does that not make it an ornithopter? Do the wings flap? I can't tell from the bullettin article.
The more detailed page is slashdotted, I only read the article, so it is very posible I'm missing something.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Latest mirror from the Internet Archive.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Sheesh! Taco should just end AC posting, verify personal information of new account applicants, and charge for the service. I'd pay a monthly fee to get rid of the trolls for good.
This is not an entirely new principle, its more like a linear ducted fan. or a Stretched turbine
A new principle would exclude fanning, flapping or any kind of turning of wheels (circular motion) to create thrust. This is a beautiful project, but it is really a derivative of Leonardos helicopter, which was an Archimedes screw for air.
When there is propulsion generated without circular motion (props, turbines, ducted fans), or without shooting something out of a tube like rocketry, then we will be talking about something that is really new.
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>waimate writes "Up until now, there's been fixed >wing, or there's been rotating wing, and that's it.
/.
What about ornithopters? None are in production, but several are in development, as has been reported on
Does the 2 tons that the fanwing can lift include the weight of the craft, fuel, etc. or is that 2 tons of cargo? The site is down...
It's a squirrel-cage fan along the leading edge of a wing.
The fan throws air over the top of the wing, rather than the air passively flowing over the leading edge. This produces much more lift at slow speeds.
Apparently it operates at slow speeds (100 kph, about 60 mph, is mentioned). I expect that at high speeds, when the forward motion exceeds the speed of the fan rotation, the fanwing behaves like a wing with ridges along the leading edge -- but air can leak through these ridges. A fanwing which starts moving too fast probably begins to lose lift from the leading edge, although it might gain some lift from the rest of the wing. But if a fanwing does not have thrust engines and only gets its forward motion from the fanwing, it can't move faster than the fanwing can push it.
i.e. it has propellers on the wings, just like the pinion feathers on the wings of a bird. It fles like a bird, therefore.
... the full flight one shows the plane stopping and hovering a couple of times ... one of the nice features of having no stall that my plane, alas, cannot emulate.
Does that not make it an ornithopter? Do the wings flap?
Ornithopter wings flap. The fan wing does not flap, so it is in no way an ornithopter (nor does it resemble one). It is a fixed wing with a horizontal rotor inside which pulls air across the lifting surface and creates a vortex which lifts the plane. Think of a big combine built into the wing, spinning quickly, and you get a rough idea. The videos are pretty cool
It isn't a new "principle" of aviation by any means, but it is a new and very promising design. Unfortunately the patent will probably limit design improvements by anyone other than the original inventor for the next twenty years or so, but there will be some innovative uses and improvements despite that, and in twenty years, once the patent expires, there will doubtless by quite a hayday of new designs.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
A helicopter can auto-rotate and land safely.
Performing an autorotation consists of:
1. Reversing the pitch on the main rotor blades. This causes them to build up speed and continues to provide drag to slow the helicopter down. It also causes a forward motion in the helicopter which helps to provide control and allows you to get to a safe landing space.
2. At the last second, the pilot will pull the control yoke backwards arresting the forward motion of the helicopter and adding more momentum to the spinning blades. At the same time, the pilot will reverse the pitch on main rotor blades again. The momentum of the blades will cause them to keep spinning forward, and the now positive angle of attack on the blades will generate significant lift arresting the downward motion.
In fact, the biggest problem is making sure that you do not over correct otherwise you can actually jump back into the air with no momentum left in the blades to stop you the second time.
Hope that helps.
-sirket
In sum, with a glide ratio of 2:1 or 3:1, you don't want to lose power in a fanwing. Let's hope they're successful in increasing it.
Very good description. And the way we "de clutch" the engine (in the UH-1Hs that I flew) was a "sprag clutch" that would allow the engine power to go to the transmission system but would disengage if it was not driving the rotor, thus not dragging down the trans/rotor/etc.
Sorry that I missed answering part of Ender Ryan's question. Yes, I have autorotated meny times, it is something we practiced in flight school and throughout the time I was flying. Since I began flying helicopters and then learned to fly airplanes much later, autorotation seems "normal" to me and gliding an airplane seems "boring". Just a perspective thing.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
****Warning****
I am not responsible for any severed arteries, eyes gouged out, or for you getting fired for doing this at work. It's all you baby!
1) Get the materials.
Go get one of those plastic Bic ball point pens. The kind with the white tube. Then get a pair of scissors, a pocket knife, or a pair of needle nose pliers.
2) Remove cap from pen. Remove the black plastic cone from the "writing" end of the pen. This also pulls out the ink tube.
3) You now have a white plastic tube with a little black cap in the end. Get that cap out. Use the pocket knife, scissors, or the pliers to get the thing out. If you destroy the end of the white plastic tube, just cut it off clean again.
4)Now you have just a white plastic tube. Wee! This is your fanwing plane. You're about to make it fly using the same principle.
5) Clean off a table so there's nothing on top. Face one side of it. Put the pen tube near and parallel to the edge. Lock your thumbs under the edge of the table and place all 8 fingertips on the white tube.
6) Pressing down as hard as you can, roll your fingers back towards you.
7) If all goes well, the tube will spin very fast and fly through the air, doing loops and such.
I've actually got the things to fly twenty yards. And the do all kinds of twists and loops.
The principle that keeps the fanwing plane in the article in the air works here too - only with no control or stability.
Enjoy, and don't get in trouble.
That's the nearest thing to a flying car I know of right now- unlike the other systems, this one seems to have fewer drawbacks.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"No, in fact what happens is this: they reverse the blades in direction: instead of "\" they turn them like "/". This causes the rotor to keep rotating in the same direction while plummeting down.Then, when they reach a certain altitude, they reverse the blade direction back to its previous position. The inertia of the whole rotor construction makes sure the rotor keeps rotating for a little while longer, but now creating downward thrust. When triggered at the right altitude you can land a chopper quite nicely this way.
Don't know the right altitude though, and it depends on the type of helicopter (weight, size and shape of rotor blades, ...), but I'm sure an apache helicopter pilot could let you in on the details. ;-)
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
Autorotating in a helicopter is not a major incident except when you have to do so abruptly at low altitude or low speed. Autogyros fly around all the time using nothing but autorotation. There's no reason that autorotation in a CarterCopter would be any "easier" than in a regular helicopter, they both work on the exact same principle.
STOP ROCK VIDEO
I'm not certain if it's really all that much safer. In the first place, you can autorotate and safely land a regular helicopter, assuming you have enough altitude. The "safety" feature of the Cartercopter is that the rotor is always autogyro. But, they are selling it as a VTOL aircraft, so what they do it spin up the rotor on the ground and disconnect it from the transmission when you leave the ground. That means you have exactly 5 seconds of lift to gain airspeed or you drop like a rock. When landing vertically, you have a little more energy to use, but you are still pretty much 100% committed. If you screw up, or catch a gust of wind, too bad because you can't pull out of your landing. This note also scares me: "at speeds slower than 30 mph, the aircraft will begin to sink even at full throttle".
That's safer!? Certainly not in VTOL as it requires more skill than a helicopter due to the limited amount of kinetic energy. Although it is marginally better in STOL because there is no "dead man's zone."
It seems that this is another form of circulation control for airfoils. This has been done for high lift wings, stopped rotors, helicopter tail booms, etc, with varying levels of success. It's an interesting way of doing it. In stead of bleading off the engine to blow out small slots, use the exhaust of the propulsive device to energize the boundry layer. This way you can keep the flow attached to the upper surface far longer than on your basic airfoil. You'd need to do that since I don't see the front half of that wing producing much lift.
...as I think they were called in the states ... my airman's exam included a few ancient questions about them, though to my knowledge they are essentially extinct. A helicopter pilot I quered described them as you do -- combining features of a fixed-wing and helicopter -- but as he put it, the gyroplane adopted all the worst aspects of each.
:)
:)
Most regular helicopters can land quite well by autorotation, in fact emergency autorotation is 75% of helicopter flight training if one already knows how to fly. Autorotating is basically diving to build up momentum in the rotor after a power failure, then increasing the pitch of the blades to slow descent into, one hopes, a half-decent landing. I tried this once with an instructor in a doorless Robinson, and as a fixed-wing pilot I admit it scared the heck out of me.
I glimpsed a gyroplane in flight for the first time the other night watching the classic It Happened One Night (1934; Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert). Highly recommended -- the movie, not the flying contraption.
Because of the design of the fanwing, there is a important part of the rotor with undesirable angle of attack, provided enough flow arrives to the rear part of the rotor where the actual action on the flow is produced- thus the aerodynamic losses of this device may be big enough to slow rotation down quickly in case of engine failure, and aerodynamic lift will go down to quick :-((.
On the same way, do not expect to see one of these for long comercial travels, since the aerodynamic losses make it unsuitable for such cases. In other words, with this approach you gain mission flexibility in expenses of more fuel consumption.
Oh, yes! I forgot! of course this is MHO.
Last time I checked, helicopters didn't tend to glide all that well either (sometimes akin to rocks).
A lot of helicopters have the ability to decouple the blades from the engine in the case of an engine failure, alowing a much more controlled landing than would be possible if the blades simply stopped. The momentum of the blades allows the helicopter to stay in the air a lot longer, in a sort of glide. You're more committed to an immediate landing than in some planes, but it's still a lot better than simply plummeting to the ground...
Most helicopters can disconnect a stopped engine from the blades, allowing them to keep spinning. The pilot then allows the vehicle to fall/glide down until he is quite close to the ground. Then by suddenly increasing the collective pitch he is able to convert the stored rotational energy of the rotors into lift, slowing the vehicle dramatically and achieving (hopefully) a soft landing.
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
A CNN report of the event. I have heard of others.
I went through military flight training in the late 80's. We would autorotate to the ground, not only in UH-1H (Hueys), but the little TH-55's as well (military name for a Hughes/Schweitzer 300).
There's two basic flavors of autorotation; from a hover and from forward flight. There's a whole range of the flight envelope that is unrecoverable, basically anything low and slow. Autorotation from a hover is simple. You let the thing settle towards the ground and just pull up before you collide with it. From forward flight is when you have to declutch and "glide" down with a flare at the end.
The TH-55's were light enough that we could pretty much stop our forward momentum before touching down, but the Hueys, being a bit heavier, would land with a fair amount of forward momentum left. They strapped these inch-thick steel bars to the bottoms of the skids for us students to grind off on the landing strips. Hours of fun!
And yes; it's as reliable as the lift you get from a fixed wing. In fact, Rotorcraft are classified into two groups: helicopters and gyroplanes. Gyroplanes are esentially like weight-shift hang-gliders except that they have a rotory wing controlled by a stick instead of a movable wing. They require forward movement (i.e. an engine and propeller) to provide the auto-rotational lift on their rotary wing.
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What about the Lifting Body (LB)? It should be included with the wing and rotor(which are really just rotating wings).
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The Space Shuttle is an LB, the wings are not really wings but they look like wings.
The Six Million Dollar Man plane that crashes during the first part of the show was a proto-type LB plane.
The new International Space Station/Alpha will use an LB emergency escape vehicle.
A lot of new high performance aircraft will use it too.
NASA info on LB
Very nice collection of pictures page is in Japanese
an interesting study
links
more links
Google