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Another Look at 1930's Cyclogyro Plane Design
trogador writes to mention that a group of researchers is taking another swing at the idea of a cyclogyro design for a UAV. Even though the cyclogyro design was invented in the 1930's there are no records of a successful flight. "Cyclogyros have the potential to be highly maneuverable flying robots due to their method of operation, making them potentially more suitable for complex tasks than helicopters and other micro air vehicles (MAVs) with less maneuverability. The biggest challenge in designing the cyclogyros is varying the angle of attack of the rotating wings. This ability would enable the plan to change altitude, hover, and fly in reverse. To achieve this quick angle variation, the researchers introduced an eccentric (rotational) point in addition to a rotational point connected to a motor."
But will it cut my lawn? Without supervision? Can I set it to keep the neighbours dog out? Lasers? Can it have lasers? Lasers would be nice.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Interesting concept. I'm wondering if they can get past the weight that the machine's complexity will add. And there's also the safety aspects when something this complicated breaks down in mid-air. Course, who cares about a robot, but this thing will never get man-rated.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Can Cyclogyros autorotate like helicopters? I suspect that they can. I have seen plans for model "airplanes" that are spinning cylinders of airfoils. This would make them a lot safer. (Or give an option for a safe recovery mode of a robot in case of engine failure.)
Lots of Google Entries but no Wikipedia
I can't remember who it was but someone was developing a new aircraft wing that had a longitudinally rotating turbine thing along the leading edge of the wing. It spun up and created airflow over the wing propelling it forward and allowing it to lift off on a very short runway. Only had a scale model I think.
Anyone know what the hell I am talking about??
Changing the angle of attack of each foil in the wing for this aircraft is no doubt complex, but even helicopters have this quite complex cyclic pitch/total pitch changing mechanisms. Given the advancement in materials and electrical actuators, it is possible that the time has come for a horizontal axis rotating wing aircraft.
May be this craft will transition from hover to flight with locked wings more easily and more stably than that boondongle from Fort Worth, V22 Osprey. Thus for the long haul you get the speed and efficiency of the fixed wing aircraft. But you get hover ability too. The price you pay is to haul a larger powerplant all the while. But still it might beat V22.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... here's a link to another page describing Cyclogyros and how they (should) work. ;)
Best of all, it has pictures!
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
Tell us what you *really* think about the V-22 Osprey...
The page linked in the summary is generating a 403 error.
The front page of the main website seems ok.
The page is returning an error, and this:-
"This Website Is Powered by Doteasy.com $0 Web Hosting"
I guess you get what you pay for.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
http://serve.me.nus.edu.sg/cyclocopter/
-Xoltri
Cyclogyro is just his lame American name. When the character was originated in Japan in 1981 Cyclogyro's name was Gyro Robo.
steampunk web design
Apparently, Chinese and Japanese are way ahead... Working prototypes and all that...
http://www.youtube.com/user/huyu0711
http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200523/000020052305A0951847.php
Figures.
It was always obvious that robotic overlords will NOT be speaking English as first language.
Well... At least we can eliminate a few more of "in charge of Gundam potentials".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
just wondering
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
the design looks like it would produce as much down presure as it would lift unless there were a way of inverting the scoop of the wing so on the down swing it could also still provide lift.
I'd like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro?
So one of the reasons they try to keep airplanes separated in the sky is because of the downward flow of air they generate behind them. For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction: if the air is lifting the plane, the plane must push the air down. If one plane flies too close to another, the downwash can cause the trailing plane to crash.
... challenging.
The wings of this thing generate a downwash at the top of the "paddle wheel" which flows down and strikes the wing at the bottom of the paddle wheel. Not one website discussing these planes mentions this. Maintaining control and lift in this situation sounds
I don't see why this wouldn't be a candidate for something similar, assuming autorotation isn't an option. Basically, there's a small rocket (or charge, I don't remember which--it's been a while since I was interested in the ultralight scene) that violently extracts the chute from the container and makes it possible for the chute to open even at very low speed/altitude.
They can't be that much additional weight if they're being installed in what are essentially hang gliders.
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Today, they are called gyroplanes. These simple aircrafts are still used today, and a lot of fun to fly. You can build one for probably as low as $8k. Here is a great short movie about present time gyroplanes:
http://planenews.com/modules.php?name=Video_Stream&page=watch&id=133
Gil.
PGP public key at: http://keskydee.com/gil.asc
For heavier aircraft, this is still not an option. Also, they still might not help for hovering at very low altitudes. I don't know of any ultralights that hover. (But let me know if I'm wrong!)
Burns: Yes, I'd like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro?
Squeaky Voiced Teen: Uh, I better look in the manual.
Burns: Ignorance!
... later ...
Squeaky Voiced Teen: This book must be out of date: I don't see "Prussia", "Siam", or "autogyro".
Burns: Well, keep looking!
First against the wall when the revolution comes
the Hiller Museum has a model of Irvin's Aerocycloid on display
:)
http://www.hiller.org/
dating from 1909.
I'll bet Leonardo had something like it too
Too bad that the site referred to in the post seems to be slashdotted. Interesting thing is that the hosting service says: "Unlimited Web Hosting", but obviously it isn't. - But that is probably normal.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If by micro air vehicle they mean like the man-portable UAV's and smaller, why don't they experiment with ornithopter designs like hummingbirds and dragonflies? As I understand it, the flight mechanics for those animals really don't scale up well for larger vehicles, explaining why we don't see 747's with dragonfly wings, but so long as the vehicle is still within the same relative size as those animals, then the only problem is power supply density.
The quad-rotor UAV designs appear to have an excellent mix of stability and maneuverability. Since the rotor blades are enclosed within their own hoops, there's not the same level of concern over blade strikes as one would have with a more conventional helicopter design. Energy densities in batteries are growing at a phenomenal rate, as revolutionary for these smaller vehicles as the development of the internal combustion engine was for moving beyond gliders to true powered flight. Electronics miniaturization is also proceeding at a phenomenal rate.
Would this eggbeater approach to flight be any more efficient or provide an advantage versus our current examples of fixed, rotary, and flapping wing designs?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The design is seventy years old.
It has never successfully flown during all that time.
LET'S SPEND MONEY ON IT NOW!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There are cyclogyro like propellors used on a number of ships. The VSP is used most prominently these days on a couple of tugboats in Prince William Sound up in Alaska.
The Flash animation at the bottom of the page linked as "Open iVSP - Interactive VSP Program" is truly amazing, and gives you a great intuitive understanding of how these machines work.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It's just a tiny difference in the wing to body ratio... http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/webbuilder/DjVu/samples/combines/red%20combine%20300dpi%20gimp.jpg
So why not use an auto gyro ala James Bond.
Of course everybody knows the best UAVs look like spitfires. I'd sign up for a sortie or two, hope and glory blaring in the headphones, stiff upper lip, handle bar mustache, ridiculously fake old etonian accent etc etc. Although I would draw the line at the very spiffy Douglas Bader replacement legs.
http://robotworldnews.com/100195.htm
Same site, linked on their main page. Looks like this might be the same article, just hosted more better++?
Gyroplanes use unpowered rotors that rotate horizontally for lift. The cyclogyro of this article uses horizontally mounted, powered wings rotating vertically for lift. It's a different beast.
:)
Nice video, though
Maybe they ought to look into a cyclogyro server cooling device in order to outmaneuver a slashdotting?
For whatever reason (unslashdoting perhaps) the actual link is one off from the link in the story.
Here is http://www.robotworldnews.com/100195.htm the working link.
Nevermore.
What about biplanes and triplanes? This isn't much different.
Even so, there is likely some loss of efficiency from the lower blade being in the downwash. The downwash "blows" across a much larger area than the lower wing. There is likely a velocity between maximum speed and hover, where the efficiency is best due to maximum downwash going between blades.
Clearly, though, it is adequatley efficient, as the video shows.
I think it's ingenious... although I can see why it's far easier to accomplish on very-small craft.
the fairy rotodyne was a much better design, and in the mid 50s had remarkable decent preformace metrics compared with today's v22. With modern technology the basic design should be able to surpass the v22. Why this wasn't done is anyones guess. My bet: a "jets are cool propellers are old attitude."
Anybody else think the name "cyclogyro" would be better used to mean a Greek bread-pouch sandwich make from one-eyed pig or sheep meat (cyclops)?
I see paddle wheels fell into disfavor with ships around 1850 or so, having been replaced by the vastly superior propellor; why are there aeronautics engineers contemplating using them on airplanes in the 21st century?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The PC is wide open and needs about a trillion lines of code just to catch malware how did you guys think the malware got into your PC anyway?
This is why i avoid IE.
dumb leaders.
www.fanwing.com
It's nice to claim hovering capabilities, but what will really happen at low speeds with the tail fin? No lift anymore, so it drops and the entire contraption tilts back.
So they would need yet another rotor to keep the tail in the air? Or give up the hovering claim and settle for STOL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTNz6NftP34
don't worry i have nothing to do with these guys.
Mod this AC post up if you wish to promote the new Dwarf Fortress version, which has been a nine-month journey of daily marathon programming sessions. Congratulations to Toady One, now let's get a story on the Slashdot front page!
For those who are interested in the ACTUAL paper instead of a nested summary here is the link to IEEE http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?isnumber=4351918&arnumber=4351934&count=17&index=11 if you or your university has a subscription you can get the full PDF here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/3516/4351918/04351934.pdf?tp=&isnumber=4351918&arnumber=4351934
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
Drag = 3 wings
Lift = 1 wing
More like Lift = about 2 wings average. By changing the angle of attack you can get lift on both the forward and reverse parts of the cycle. (Even if you DO bend the airfoil from a symmetrical shape to improve its lift-drag ratio for one direction at the cost of reducing it for the other - which you still might want to do if the vehicle spends most of its time going "forward".)
A three-blade/rotor cyclogyro has about the same math as three-phase power, by the way. It's a bit less efficient than DC but has other advantages that made it the system of choice for most long-distance power transmission.
With more than one wing (average) producing lift you can downsize the wings in proportion. With the wings moving even when the plane is not you can downsize them a LOT compared to a fixed-wing craft: The latter requires wings big enough to lift the vehicle at taxing speed, which makes them considerably oversized (and over-draggy) for actual flight. They compensate somewhat by adding flaps and slats to change the wing shape to improve lift (at big cost in drag) for takeoff and landing. But there's still a vast difference between the blade area of a fixed-wing and a helicopter. A cyclogyro is on the helicopter side of this gulf.
Also: A cyclogyro doesn't have the same problem as a helicopter when flying faster than the blade's rotation (which causes the blades to lose lift on the "retreating" side, making it tip over and crash.) As you speed up you lose lift on the "backward" part of the cycle but gain it on the "forward" part.
If you want to get really fancy you could modify the wing pitch control so you could transition to keeping all three wings pointing forward in level flight. Then you transition to a triplane. But you have tiny wings compared to a fixed-wing craft. That mode ought to be a LOT more efficient than a fixed-wing, because the wings don't have the take-off/landing size penalty and can be optimized for efficient level flight. (You can even pick the final positions and bend the blades for best lift, at some small cost to the cyclogyro-mode. Also you can use multi-wing interactions for still better performance, like the jib on a sailboat directing air across the mainsail.) But let's stick with the basic machine...
Transmission Mechanism = Very Heavy
Really? Two bearings and a mechanism for adjusting the location of one of them? Plus "rocker" bearings on the wings? Sounds pretty light to me.
Support Structure = Very Very Heavy
Compared to a wing? Or a helicopter blade? Show me...
Pressure Center (Sustentation)= Shifts
Vibration = More than a helicopter
Not if you do it right. Adjust the wings to have lift that is a sinusoidal function of position: Bingo: Center and magnitude of the combined lift is constant through the cycle. No vibration at all. (There are other functions that do that as well. But sine is easy.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It'll make a really cool farm combine -- much better looking than the ugly monstrosities they have now...
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Very few prototypes were built, and those that were constructed were completely unsuccessful.
It's easy to see why those failed. You can get lift and thrust adjustment out of the rotors, and if you can do that separately on the two sides you can also get yaw and roll control (though the presence of a rudder on the tail implies they're not depending on the rotors for yaw). But for pitch: Zero, zip, nada. That tail assembly depends on a slipstream to give you pitch control. Also there's nothing but the elevator to resist the drag moment of the rotors.
Seems to me that, like a helicopter, a cyclogyro needs either a tail rotor (though pointed up, not sideways) or front-and-rear counter-rotating rotors. (You might POSSIBLY get away with inline counter-rotating rotors and vary drag to get pitch control. But that would introduce all sorts of complexity.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't think so. No power. Down you go, out of control.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
www.fanwing.com
From NY Times
When you first see the FanWing, you think: there's no way that thing is going to fly. After all, it looks less like an airplane than a big, lumbering combine harvester that has somehow strayed from its wheat field. It has a hollow cylinder where its wings ought to be, and when it trundles down the runway, it moves barely faster than a bicycle. But then it lifts off, angles up and -- whoa -- soars up into the sky.
Also, Wikipedia
Here's a link with a bit more practical info, and a video of a working model. As conjectured elsewhere this machine has a tail rotor with a vertical shaft (like a helicopter main rotor) to compensate for the cyclo-rotors.
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Quick men, on to the other site now that we've taken down the first! xD
Below certain speeds/altitudes/rotor speed (total available energy), you're crashing in a helicopter if power cuts out.
I don't believe it will auto rotate. Helicopters do because forward motion can be used to spin the rotors like an auto gyro.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'