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Airplane Coatings Help Recoup Fuel Efficiency Lost To Bug Splatter
MTorrice writes: When bugs hit the wings of oncoming airplanes, they create a problem. Their blood, called hemolymph, sticks to an airplane's wings, disrupting the smooth airflow over them and reducing the aircraft's fuel efficiency. To fight the problem, NASA is working on developing a coating that could help aircraft repel bug remains during flight. After experimenting with almost 200 different formulations, researchers recently flight-tested a few promising candidates. Results showed that they could reduce the amount of stuck bug guts on the wings by up to 40%. With further optimization, NASA says such coatings could allow planes to use 5% less fuel.
thank you!!
First of all - where do I pick up one of these guns:
"To test these materials in the lab, researchers developed a pneumatic launcher to fire living bugs at a sample coating. They first used crickets as ammunition, but a physicist colleague urged them to switch to fruit flies, which would be more representative of what planes hit during takeoff and landing."
Second - I hope they develop a clear coating as I would like it on my motorcycle visor.
"up to (40%) " and "further optimization". and i'll eat less and exercise.
Sailplanes have used mechanical bug wipers for many years.
It's not weight, it's maintaining laminar flow. It only takes very small objects to turbulate the boundary layer, increasing drag considerably.
I wonder if this will eliminate the need to deice planes in the winter. Or if will cause issues with it repelling the deicing fluid they spray on the planes when it's cold.
Glider pilots have been using these for many years, though I'm not sure how they'd hold up against a 500 knot airspeed vs 50kn.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
http://www.dianasailplanes.com...
Where companies don't pass on cost savings to their customers, it's not a competitive market.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Surely, you're utterly wrong. One takeoff can easily put enough bugs on the leading edge to destroy laminar flow. Heavy bug loads on the leading edge can easily increase drag by 30% over a clean wing. Glider pilots use mechanical wipers to remove the bugs in flight. Waviness of more than .005 inch is needed to maintain laminar flow. Once the flow becomes turbulent, drag rises considerably. Just washing the wings on the ground won't help.
I guess if estimates say 5% of fuel, but...
- half or more of flights are in the winter, when there are no bugs or a lot less of them.
- most flights spend most of their time at bug free altitudes.
- many airports are in urban areas with reduced bug populations
Is this mostly a small plane phenomenon?
Can I get some for my motorcycle windscreen, and the visor on my helmet?
During the spring and summer, I have to wipe my helmet on a daily basis.
Impact of build-up during a single flight surely falls below the point where applying and maintaining a fancy coating is cheaper than having Jose hos-e off the bugs.
I can imagine a flight out of Orlando Florida in August could easily make this worthwhile. I'm not sure if speed makes any actual difference for the number of bugs that get hit, but it always seemed like I had a lot more bugs splattered on my car when I drove faster. If so, a plane certainly hits higher speeds than I have in a car.
Bug guts are sticky. They do not simply hose off. You need to actually scrub them off, and if you're doing that, you need skilled labor because there are lots of sensitive things that stick out of aircraft.
More than one aircraft has been lost because someone missed removing some tape covering some hole or other that was applied in order to wash the aircraft.
And there's a lot of surface to scrub, too.
Even little bug smashers like Cessnas take a good while to clean off (and flying through a bog meant you often flew through a crowd of mosquitos, so the leading edge was covered in lots of little red spots).
American corporations will instead do the following.
Get a government grant for the coatings, claim the actual full purchase price at full retail as the cost and pass that cost to ticket buyers.
Use the 5% fuel savings as a ,"we are saving the planet.... see? SEE?" advertising campaign.
Also add the costs of the advertising to the ticket prices.
Profits go up an additional 75%, claim they need more government subsidies.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Got it. Bugs in the airplane's airflow decrease fuel economy, but aren't considered a safety concern.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Under every summary, there's a small puzzle of colored blocks. Looks like it says "bird fucking", but I don't get it.
It handles my cooking just fine. Better than my own stomach in some cases.
So how do wash the wings right after takeoff?
I think that's going to add quite a lot of time if the plane has to circle really low for multiple passes each time for Jose to hose the wings off.
Meh. I figured the fact its melting point is 327c would have been enough. Guess not.
Rain-X! Lots and lots of Rain-X!!!
Life is not for the lazy.
Have gnu, will travel.
Indeed. You can measure the performance degradation in a sailplane caused by bug impacts on the leading edges.
I've been binge-watching Mayday (a.k.a. Air Crash Investigations), and I have not seen a single episode where bug splatter on the wings brought down a plane. There was one episode where a spider built a nest in the pitot tube, but nothing with the wings. They would be far better off developing anti-ice coating. Ice brings down planes on a regular basis.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes, but golf balls travel further because they are turbulent.
Learn to love Alaska
So? If that's the only requirement, then the fuselage should be pitted, yes?
Learn to love Alaska
Rain-X! Lots and lots of Rain-X!!!
My dad used to use Rain-X on his propeller to keep the bugs from sticking. It actually worked pretty well but had to be reapplied fairly often. I think they're going for something a little more permanent here.
-- Remember, we're not happy until you're not happy. -- Local FAA Inspector --
Rain-X! Lots and lots of Rain-X!!!
I've used Rain-X before. It's great stuff, (having some wax type properties) at and above 35 mph I never had to use my wipers and didn't. Any slower and there was no force (wind resistance) to move the rain/water, but at 35+ it was outstanding.
Buying it at Costco I did indeed have lots of it, one purchase and I was bulked up with Rain-X for a long time.
I see no evidence that anyone has studied the additional drag caused by bug debris. Lots of study given to a cure, none for the 'problem'. Exactly how much drag do they cause? Perhaps they should start with an analysis of the golf ball. All those distortions on the surface that we call 'dimples'. They must cause a great deal of drag that prevents long distances being reached. Oh, wait...
...omphaloskepsis often...
it's long, straight, and round. What level of lift does it provide? http://www.airliners.net/aviat... and other sources indicate it's trivial.
Learn to love Alaska
No, they're actually a spinning sphere that generates lift.
I was thinking Goo Gone. There's a reason why they sell the stuff by the liter.
I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!
There is some loss of laminar flow, but 5% seems wildly optimistic for eliminating bugs under any normal sort of operation. I only fly piston planes so maybe someone flying jets can comment, but 5% is enough to affect your fuel reserve calculations and I've never heard of a "bug" correction.
As is not particularly unusual, the title is incorrect.
"Airplane Coatings Help Recoup Fuel Efficiency Lost To Bug Splatter"
From Merriam Webster: recoup "to get an equivalent for (as losses) : make up for " or "to make good or make up for something lost"
This coating would not 'recoup' the lost fuel efficiency. Better words to use would be "reduce" or "minimize".
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
If you do the leading edges and windscreen with furniture polish (people swear by Lemon Pledge, I use Mr Sheen because Pledge doesn't seem to be sold locally) the bug guts wipe off very easily (and I suspect many just don't stick but I've not done a scientific test of this).
Take an awful lot of Pledge to do an airliner leading edge, though.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Same way as many cars wash their headlights? There are piles of answers to the question. A temporary surface used for takeoff that's retracted after takeoff, removing all the bugs with it.
I can think of 100 ways to solve this, so when people make it sound hard, that just proves they are dumb. Yes, not all are good, and at most one would be optimal, but give me a few million dollars, and I can make more headway.
Learn to love Alaska
.. by coating Windows with this new product will finally make it the OS people have been waiting for!!! :D
Competition works as thus: supplying the first units of a thing requires less labor (less cost) than supplying further units, unless you have an advantage (a more productive mine, local access to materials, better processes); you can inflate your prices to some point below what the next guy can charge. If it costs you $100/unit to build, and the next guy spends $150/unit, you can raise your prices as high as $150/unit; you can keep your prices as low as $100/unit to undercut and weaken the competition; you cannot go below $100/unit, and your competition cannot go below $150/unit, without taking losses and risking business failure.
Whenever I explain wealth, people tell me I'm full of shit because reducing costs doesn't reduce price to consumers. They then turn around and argue something magical about competition driving prices down.
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The ideal would be for it to be smooth until the natural transition point then have vortex generators.
If you look at a lot of aircraft the will have flush rivets over the front part of the fuselage and regular over the back for that reason. Some will have vortex generators on the wings as well also for that same effect.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No, it's retroactive. From the first flight, their tanks will be gaining fuel in midair - making up fuel lost in the last 100 years without this coating.
Why would that equate to 5% lower ticket prices? Fuel isn't the only thing they have to pay for; there's repairs, maintenance, salaries, etc. Just because one cost went down by 5% doesn't mean they can charge 5% less.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
> They then turn around and argue something magical about competition driving prices down.
That's because the price isn't "Costs plus a markup", it's "Whatever the market will bear"
Competition forces the price down to the former by giving the market a choice, otherwise vendors will charge whatever they like, because they can.
You might think it's trivial, but fuselage lift accounts for about 1/3 of the total lift on a Boeing 747 at cruise.
There's a reason they fly nose-high.
You think there are piles of answers to this question, but as with all armchair quarterbacks you seem to think that the people who are actually working on the problem are stupid.
you seem to think that the people who are actually working on the problem are stupid.
Nope, I just think the idiots here are idiots (not that everyone's an idiot, but the idiots are, by definition).
So how do wash the wings right after takeoff?
How do cars wash their headlights? How do gliders do it? How do in-flight de-icing systems work?
THe point is some idiot asking a stupid question with 1,000,000 answers can't think of any of the answers, so he assumes the answer is hard. It isn't. Doing it cheaply, reliably, and with no weight may be harder, but those are implementation details, not big picture.
Learn to love Alaska
You seem to have missed the sarcasm inherent in my original comment.
The GP was claiming that they could just hose the wings down rather than using an anti-bug coating.
I was just wondering out loud how that would work when the plane is in flight given that the hose probably has a finite length.
What you know about aerodynamics could fill one golf ball dimple with
space left over for a cock which could fill your anal cavity.
There is a fine line between humour and trolling, and you have managed to erase that line. Well played.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
That's because the price isn't "Costs plus a markup", it's "Whatever the market will bear"
"The Market" is the magical part. Price is absolutely not less than cost--you can't stay in business spending $1000 to build computers that you sell for $10, although strategic undercutting happens (10 million volume manufacturer sells at a loss to put 10 thousand volume manufacturer out of business), as well as loss-leader strategies (sell the coffee maker cheap; overcharge on the coffee).
Competition forces the price down to the former by giving the market a choice
Which means if you have the means to produce at a lower cost than any competitor, competition will not lower prices; indeed, you can undercut competition below their costs, driving them out of business.
That means competitive markets are strange beasts, especially with rising costs: if the producers charge $1000 for a product that costs $300, $500, and $700 to produce, rising costs can push you up to $350, $580, $820, and yet the price can stay around $1000 because Mr. $350 doesn't see a need to raise prices yet, and Mr. $820 is trying to cut his costs back by any means necessary. Soon Mr. $820 will have costs over $1000, and will sell his business to a competitor--Mr. $350 will have the most spare capital, and be able to make the best bid.
Let the $820 guy find out how to make shit for $500, and he might undercut the market in a bid to get more market share and attempt a hostile take-over of the $580 business. Maybe not. In any case, a fourth player can make the product for $1100, but market price is $1000, so he can't enter the market.
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Serious question : most commercial aircraft spend most of their moving time at many kilometres high and many centigrade below zero. Products that work at near zero (degC) may simply not work under these circumstances.
To a first approximation, drag varies as the square of the speed difference, and the speed difference is going to be greatest at cruising/ working altitude, not when taxi-ing around at STP.
(Yes, it's a first approximation. When I was learning practical turbulence, I was advised to start searching for approximate coefficients by analysing my data set using drag = constant * flow^1.86 ; in theory it should be ^2, but the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, and in practice, there is.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"