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Another Ornithopter Takes Off
mnmn writes "Ornithopters have been around for a while, but a professor at the Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies has made progress with his. It flew for 14 seconds and covered a third of a kilometer. However it landed with a bit of a crash. Interestingly it uses a glow jet turbine from RC aircraft."
As far as I was aware model jet turbines run on Kerosene, just like their bigger brethren. Glow fuel is Nitromethane mixed with a lubricant such as Castor or Synthetic oil.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Someone flapping about something worthwhile!
Task Mangler
Cool!!! Can't wait for those charter flights to America on Boing Ornithopters... I wonder what kind of drinks they offer...
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I wonder if one problem is birds wings, while they do flap, they do not have a rigid shape, they change shape durring flight.
I wonder if an ornithopter could work with a wing that could change it shape slightly.
of course I am still not sure, is there an advantage to an ornithopter or is it just a curiosity thing?
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These things really didn't help Paul.
My friend invented a flapping paper airplane 20+ years ago in junior high. Of course it's not nearly the same, since it reacts to pressure fluctuations instead of creating them. There are (pdf) instructions so anyone can be an ornithoptrix.
A slashdot article that is
1) Interesting
2) NOT and infomercial or astroturf
3) Has a paragraph to page ratio of greater than 2
4) Has some modicum of detail
5) Not about SCO, Apple, Google or Mr. Bill
Congrats. Of course, the signal to noise ratio is still painfully small. But it's a start.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The professor's website is being hammered by us, so I've only got the Star article to go from. "The R/C turbine provides thrust to get up to takeoff speed, at which point the flapping wings take over." I didn't see mention of a secondary propulsion means that causes the wings to flap. Electric motor? Pedal power? Briggs & Stratton? I'm curious how much horsepower it takes to keep his bird aloft. Anyone know?
A bird's wing is an aerodynamic lifting body, and model ornithopters were flying before the Wright Brothers. They don't "fight against the lift" of the wing, but use it in a pretty sophisticated way.
We don't have human-carrying ornithopters because scaling effects get in the way. The ability of a wing to produce lift (and the muscle power available to it, in the case of a bird) goes up as the square of the size, but the weight goes up as the cube.
This is what limits the size of birds. A hummingbird can fly all day, even hovering motionless. A robin needs to rest once in a while. An eagle can only fly under muscle power in bursts; most of the time he has to soar on rising thermal currents like a sailplane. An ornithopter big enough to carry a human is going to need a LOT of power.
rj
I suspect that this can be chalked up to the proportionatly enormous wing muscles these birds have, which is why ducks and geese are sought after game birds. They have tons of white meat compared to, say, a crow. They also have a relatively long wingspan for their weight, I think.
Also, migratory birds don't fly the whole way from Canada down south in one go. They often stop to rest and refuel (and crap on my car).
I'm no ornithologist, but these seem like logical deductions. Could be wrong.
There are three posts describing what glow fuel is, they are all somewhat different, and they are all modded to 4 or 5 points as either informative or insightful. Who is the winner?
And is this post funny, insighful, informative, or is it just off topic?
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Incidentally, you can buy some pretty neat ornithopter kits from www.ornithopter.org. I'm not affiliated or anything, just interested in flapping-wing flight and experimenting on a small scale.
The development of flapping wing flight is interesting because it can also have other applications. I am especially interested in the use of 'flapper' designs in water craft (specifically for use in robotics). An interesting use of similar tech can be seen in these kayaks. Intersting stuff.
Real nerds thought of Dune.