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Human Powered Helicopter
marcopo writes "In response to a 24 year old prize challenge from the American Helicopter Society, a number of engineering students at the University of British Columbia have designed a human powered helicopter. The prize requirements are 3 minutes flight at 3 meters, with only human power, and the team, led by UBC's Mike Georgallis, plans a test flight next Tuesday.
The Vancouver Sun also has the
story."
Yaba-Daba-Dooooo!!!!! ~~~~~*Sppppppplat*
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
If it's $1000, and you don't need a helicopter pilot's license, I'll buy one. If it works, that is.
Can they use a battery? As in charge the battery using human power and then run the motor off the battery power???
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12.) WILL IT FLY? The machine is heavier than originally designed... The unknown at the moment is whether the machine will break up prior to lift off. Whether or not any system will break up becomes all the more relevant when it involves humans and rotating blades.
Instruction manual:
1. Place helmet on head. Take a swig from your hip flask. Decide you don't need the helmet.
2. Spread arms parallel to ground.
3. Hum 'whirrrr' as you spin yourself to speed.
4. Upon striking your head on the floor on the way down, remark how free you feel in the open air.
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First the machines use us to power helecopers! Soon they will have us power all their functions after we scortch the sun! Who is with me? We must stop this to save Zion!
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That's the only real question. They should be more careful wording the requirement.
3 Meters is a pretty high distance to fall from, even without being surrounded by fast moving metal, cogs, and chains. Considering that they'll want to optimize the weight of the machine, there will almost certainly be no safety cage or equipment.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to pilot it.
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You already have the world's best human helicopter in Inspector Gadget.
Oh man, their project is named Thunderbird. Quick, Mozilla Foundation! Send our your legions of lawyers! We must stop this blatant misuse of your trademarks!!
[insert witty comment here]
afaik it's quite hard to build a human powered plane (yes, someone made it from France to England many years ago). A helicopter is much trickier, because the pilot must run two rotors at the same time. It's not easy to transfer human energy to two places without adding much weight. I'm not an expert in helicopters, but it's kinda obvious to me that the pilot would have to use extraordinary effort to stay above the ground for 3 minutes.
I don't read replies by ACs.
Could something like this eventually be as common as the bicycle? I, for one, think it would be pretty cool to fly to work everyday.
Reminds me of watching the Jetsons as a kid LOL
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"Jane, get me off this crazy thing! JAAAAANE!!!" ~~~~~~~~ *Spppppplat*
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just burn humans for fuel?
I don't read replies by ACs.
i wonder why they went with the recombent position rather than a upright postion. i would imagine you get a little extra power upright. you're not worried about airdynamics when hovering also.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Yeah, I get a whole 28.8 (somtimes just 26.4).
Seriously though, most don't have broadband. So do you do a website for the small percentage who do, or for everyone?
Mycroft
(and no, I can't get a better connection without HUGE expense)
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Everyone knows Alex Kidd invented the pedicopter in 1983.
Those wings have a huge volume, you should be able to get pretty good lift if you filled them with helium. Of course I don't know what the rules would say.
From the rules:
4.1.1 The machine shall be a heavier-than-air machine. The use of lighter-than- air gases shall be prohibited.
In case anyone here doesnt know about generating watts, 500 sustained for over 3 minutes is quite a task. I have been rowing for 7 years and this year our team had physiological testing where we started at 200 watts and increased by 50 every 2 minutes. I last about 8 minutes and managed to hit about 400 watts but couldnt hold it long enough to be allowed to continue to 450. We increased in this manner in order to find our VO2 maxes, and certainly had I started at 500 watts I could have held it for a while, maybe a minute and a half. But 3 minutes is just sick. Especially since this was on the rowing machine which uses all muscles and this guy is only uses his legs, no back and arms. This 3 minute test will generate enough lactic acid to kill the average 60 year old man, and will certainly leave him in excruciating pain if he is able to do it at all.
BAH, we have one of these teams at my school too (University of Michigan).
Although i will admit i didn't RTFA, it's not news unless it actually FLIES. This has been tried and failed many many times already.
Just put the human(s), bald and naked, into liquid-filled pods and wire 'em up for electrical power! Then build some hovering tentacled robots to do maintenance. Then... ...Or you could do it the boring way -- you know, pedals and the like...
The technique usually used for this I understand is conformal mapping. There's a little spiel and animation about it here. The calculation itself isn't really that fun, at least from what I remember from my homework assignments, but its pretty cool that it can be done systematically for all these airfoils.
If you are into the details, from the the Riemann theorem quoted in the wikipedia link, any simply connected subset of the complex plane can be mapped onto a disk, and since it's easy to conformally map from a disk to the complex plane minus that disk - like in the figure on the second linked page - then once you know that first mapping for whatever shape your airfoil is (the hard part) you can figure out all the fluid flows around that shape. Of course, this entire technique only works for infinitely long airfoils, since the complex plane just represents a cross-section. If you dislike math and want the actual figure you can just stick it into an air-tunnel and skip the calculation. But you get the idea.
Aside from that, let me attack your points.
I consider 10 feet or 3 meters to be high enough to cause significant injury to a simple terran.
The gears and chains are made out of metal if you look at the pictures. Have you ever heard of such things being made of composites? That would be quite bizarre.
Ground effect is the only decent bit of info you mention. For those who aren't aware, ground effect is the phenomenon by which a helicopter rests on a cushion of air bounded by the ground and the rotor disc. The area in which it is useful exists roughly at an altitude equal to the diameter of the rotor disc. It's essential for all low-powered flight, especially an emergency autorotation landing in something over than an autogyro.
"Helicopter flying books?" I assume you mean rotary-wing aerodynamics books. I've read some; they're quite good.
...for a motorised version.
;)
Whilst there's something undeniably cool about what basically amounts to an airborne bicycle, I'd settle for an airborne moped. Using a small (~1-2 bhp) moped engine would make for only a minor weight increase, and it would surely make for less sweat
I'm a certificated pilot (fixed-wing) who's flown helicopters (a Robinson R22 Beta) once, and that was so incredibly fun that I'd hop in an ultralight homebuilt chopper in a second. Just let me know where to buy the kit.
p
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maybe they need to have a contest where college kids build a webserver that can stand up to a slashdot link for more than 5 minutes...
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
"Well I just flew in from Atlanta, and boy my arms^H^H^H^Hlegs are tired" /insert drum fill here/
where does everyone come up with this 3 minute hover stuff?
if you had read the rules of the contest, or the story from the paper (which i read IN the paper), you dorks would have seen its a 1 minute hover requirement, not 3.
why bother even putting links to the info if no one is going to read it?
oh, i forgot, i am new here, and this is slashdot. idiots.
I'm not sure what the average weight of vaccums are, but looking at my hand-me-down, just one would add an easy 50 pounds.
...the end result would like a cross between a beer bong and Volkswagen Bug with rotors.
While a human powered helicopter is impressive, I have a feeling the UBC engineers won't feel accomplished until they hang the thing underneath some bridge.
Both the pilot and the contest are 24. I suspect UBC's genetic engineering program started on the engineer when the contest was first announced....It has nothing to do with the chopper design and everything to do with the pilot. ;-)
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Here's a link to a SAMPE journal paper describing the project in details.