Many of us will have sat and idly watched the flaps and other moving parts of an airliner wing as we travel, and it’s likely that most of you will know the basics of how an aircraft wing works. But there’s more to an aircraft wing than meets the eye, which is why the Aerospace Bristol museum has an Airbus A320 wing on display. [Chris Lymas] was part of the team which turned a surplus piece of aircraft into an interactive and working exhibit, and he told the Electromagnetic Field audience all about it in his talk Using Arduinos to Resurrect an Airliner Wing.
The talk starts with an explanation of how a variable surface wing works, and then starts to talk about the control systems employed. We’re struck with the similarity to industrial robots, in that this is a a powerful and thus surprisingly dangerous machine to be close to. The various moving surfaces are moved by a series of shafts and gearboxes, driven by a DC motor. Running the show is an Arduino Mega, which has enough interfaces for all the various limit switches.
It’s fascinating to see how the moving parts in an airliner wing work up close, and we’re impressed at the scale of the parts which keep us safe as we fly. Take a look, the video is below the break.
Ornithopters have been — mostly — the realm of science fiction. However, a paper in Advanced Intelligent Systems by researchers at Lund University proposes that flapping wings may well power the drones of the future. The wing even has mock feathers.
Birds, after all, do a great job of flying, and researchers think that part of it is because birds fold their wings during the upstroke. Mimicking this action in a robot wing has advantages. For example, changing the angle of a flapping wing can help a bird or a drone fly more slowly.
Drones are pretty common in the electoronics landscape today, and are more than just a fun hobby. They’ve enabled a wide array of realtors, YouTubers, surveyors, emergency responders, and other professionals to have an extremely powerful tool at their disposal. One downside to these tools is that the power consumption tends to be quite high. You can either stick larger batteries on them, or, as [Nicholas] demonstrates, just spin them really fast during flight.
We featured his first tests with this multi-modal drone flight style a while back, but here’s a quick summary: by attaching airfoils to the arms of each of the propellers and then spinning the entire drone, the power requirements for level flight can be dramatically reduced. This time, he’s back to demonstrate another benefit to this unique design, which is its ability to turn on its side and fly in level flight like an airplane. It’s a little bizarre to see it in the video, as it looks somewhat like a stationary propeller meandering around the sky, but the power requirements for this mode of flight are also dramatically reduced thanks to those wings on the arms.
There are a few downsides to this design, namely that the vertical wing only adds drag in level flight, so it’s not as efficient as some bi-wing designs, but it compromises for that loss with much more effective hover capabilities. He also plans to demonstrate the use of a camera during spin-hover mode as well in future builds. It’s an impressive experiment pushing the envelope of what a multi-rotor craft can do, and [Nicholas] still has plans to improve the design, especially when it comes to adding better control when it is in spin-hover mode. We’d expect plenty of other drones to pick up some of these efficiency gains too, except for perhaps this one.
The exact airfoil shape of a wing has a massive effect on the performance and efficiency of an aircraft and will be selected based on the intended flight envelope. If you’re moving beyond foam board wings, 3D printing is an excellent way to create an accurate airfoil, and [Tom Stanton] provides us with an excellent guide to modeling wing sections for easy printing.
[Tom] used the process demonstrated in the video after the break to create the wing for his latest VTOL RC aircraft. It was printed with lightweight PLA, which can ooze badly when it stops extruding. To get around this, he designed the wings and their internal ribs to be printed in one continuously extruded line.
He wanted a wing that would allow a smooth transition from hover to forward flight, and used the Airfoil Tools website to find and download the appropriate airfoil profile. After importing the profile into Fusion 360, he created internal ribs in a diagonal grid pattern, with lightening holes running along the length of the wing. A cylinder runs along the core of the wing to fit a carbon fiber wing spar. The ribs are first treated as a separate body in CAD and split into four quadrants. When these quadrants combine with the outer shell, it allows the slicer to treat the entire print as a continuous external perimeter line using “vase mode“.
These steps might seem simple, but it took about 3 weeks of experimentation to find a process that works. It’s primarily intended for straight wings with a continuous profile, but it should be adaptable to tapered/swept wings too. A well-designed airframe is essential when pushing aircraft to the edge of efficiency, like solar-powered plane to fly overnight.
It’s a fact of operating an aircraft, that the make noise. If you’re an aviator you might want to quiet your craft to avoid annoying people nearby, or you might even want to operate in stealth mode. It turns out that there are different sources of noise on a plane depending upon the phase of flight. A NASA study found that when landing, a gap between the wing and leading edge slats causes air to cavitate causing unnecessary noise. Blocking that hole would allow for quieter landings, but there was no material suitable for both normal flight and the landing. That is, until Texas A&M researchers devised a way to use a shape memory alloy to do it.
In addition to two different shape memory alloy configurations, the study looks at a more conventional fiberglass composite, although this would only work for a limited number of wing configurations.
So you say you want to fly above the waves on an electric hydrofoil, but you don’t have the means to buy a commercial board. Or, you don’t have the time and skills needed to carve a board and outfit it with the motor and wing that let it glide above the water. Are you out of luck? Not if you follow this hackworthy e-foil build that uses a waterproof rifle case as the… hull? Board? Whatever, the floaty bit.
If you haven’t run across an e-foil before, prepare to suddenly need something you never knew existed. An e-foil is basically a surfboard with a powerful brushless motor mounted on a keel of sorts, fairly far below the waterline. Along with the motor is a hydrofoil to provide lift, enough to raise the board well out of the water as the board gains speed. They look like a lot of fun.
Most e-foils are built around what amounts to a surfboard, with compartments to house the battery, motor controller, and other electronics. [Frank] and [Julian] worked around the difficult surfboard build by just buying a waterproof rifle case. It may not be very hydrodynamic, but it’s about the right form factor, it already floats, and it has plenty of space for electronics. The link above has a lot of details on the build, which started with reinforcing the case with an aluminum endoskeleton, but at the end of the day, they only spent about 2,000€ on mostly off-the-shelf parts. The video below shows the rifle case’s maiden voyage; we were astonished to see how far and how quickly the power used by the motor drops when the rifle case leaves the water.
Compared to some e-foil builds we’ve seen, this one looks like a snap. Hats off to [Frank] and [Julian] for finding a way to make this yet another hobby we could afford but never find time for.
Last week we featured a story on the new rules regarding drone identification going into effect in the US. If you missed the article, the short story is that almost all unmanned aircraft will soon need to transmit their position, altitude, speed, and serial number, as well as the position of its operator, likely via WiFi or Bluetooth. The FAA’s rule change isn’t sitting well with Wing, the drone-based delivery subsidiary of megacorporation Alphabet. In their view, local broadcast of flight particulars would be an invasion of privacy, since observers snooping in on Remote ID traffic could, say, infer that a drone going between a pharmacy and a neighbor’s home might mean that someone is sick. They have a point, but how a Google company managed to cut through the thick clouds of irony to complain about privacy concerns and the rise of the surveillance state is mind boggling.
Speaking of regulatory burdens, it appears that getting an amateur radio license is no longer quite the deal that it once was. The Federal Communications Commission has adopted a $35 fee for new amateur radio licenses, license renewals, and changes to existing licenses, like vanity call signs. While $35 isn’t cheap, it’s not the end of the world, and it’s better than the $50 fee that the FCC was originally proposing. Still, it seems a bit steep for something that’s largely automated. In any case, it looks like we’re still good to go with our “$50 Ham” series.
Staying on the topic of amateur radio for a minute, it looks like there will be a new digital mode to explore soon. The change will come when version 2.4.0 of WSJT-X, the program that forms the heart of digital modes like WSPR and FT8, is released. The newcomer is called Q65, and it’s basically a follow-on to the current QRA64 weak-signal mode. Q65 is optimized for weak, rapidly fading signals in the VHF bands and higher, so it’s likely to prove popular with Earth-Moon-Earth fans and those who like to do things like bounce their signals off of meteor trails. We’d think Q65 should enable airliner-bounce too. We’ll be keen to give it a try whenever it comes out.
Look, we know it’s hard to get used to writing the correct year once a new one rolls around, and that time has taken on a relative feeling in these pandemic times. But we’re pretty sure it isn’t April yet, which is the most reasonable explanation for an ad purporting the unholy coupling of a gaming PC and mass-market fried foods. We strongly suspect this is just a marketing stunt between Cooler Master and Yum! Brands, but taken at face value, the KFConsole — it’s not a gaming console, it’s at best a pre-built gaming PC — is supposed to use excess heat to keep your DoorDashed order of KFC warm while you play. In a year full of incredibly stupid things, this one is clearly in the top five.
And finally, it looks like we can all breathe a sigh of relief that our airline pilots, or at least a subset of them, aren’t seeing things. There has been a steady stream of reports from pilots flying in and out of Los Angeles lately of a person in a jetpack buzzing around. Well, someone finally captured video of the daredevil, and even though it’s shaky and unclear — as are seemingly all videos of cryptids — it sure seems to be a human-sized biped flying around in a standing position. The video description says this was shot by a flight instructor at 3,000 feet (914 meters) near Palos Verdes with Catalina Island in the background. That’s about 20 miles (32 km) from the mainland, so whatever this person is flying has amazing range. And, the pilot has incredible faith in the equipment — that’s a long way to fall in something with the same glide ratio as a brick.
