- Joined
- Nov 26, 2006
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Hopfan said:This looks sweet. Post some pics or drawings of the wing design when you have time. I'd love to see that. Many, many years ago, one of the guys in the club I used to fly with designed an experimental with a front opening flap on the front of the wings. Most guys bet that when he deployed, it would fly underground. It had an amazing lift characteristic, but the drag was real high and made it unstable at lower speeds in wind. Cool experiment though.
Yeah, drag is a big issue, but most planes in this category have around 55-80 sq ft of wing area, so even with the high drag, the surface area of my design is pretty tiny (34sqft). Just standing next to the wing, I think to myself, "Uhh.. this is it? 7.75 feet outward from the cockpit? That's all the wing I've got?" But the math says it'll fly... and so everything is scaled way the heck down and that should help. I agree that if you stick a 60 sqft wing on a low-powered plane and try to have a flaps set up like this, you're beggin for trouble, but my calculations say that with everything deployed, it should still have less drag than some ultralights with similar HP numbers. It's only when the flaps and gear come up that things should get exciting.
The real problem is going to be the forces on the tail. Flaps cause the center of lift to go backwards on the wing and this shifts the CG more forward (relatively speaking), so you need more down elevator to compensate. A big elevator with large control surfaces negate the gains you get from the tiny wing, etc... It's all a big balancing act. If I can keep the plane under 450lbs, everything will be good.