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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."
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...
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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.
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some images of the plane on google
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.
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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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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.
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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.
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****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!"...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.
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...
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!
From an email reply to me: "We have now changed server - the original one really struggled to keep up for us but slashdot was just too heavy especially with everyone downloading our video clips - we lost our connection after 18,000 hits in just a few hours. Amazing. We hope to be back tomorrow. Dikla"