The air wing....

[fastback33]

I had this thought earlier today concerning aerodynamics. Bare wtihh me as i am not the most savvy to be able to explain something.

So here it is; Would there be any remote possibility to from say a wing of wind forming from contours on a body? Right, i know that one of the limitations is how do you form the wing, but say you have various contours counter acting one another to form I guess in essence an invisible wing?? It is not a thoroughly thought out idea, but i wanted to put it out there incase some of you guys could innovate adn build on the idea. I know it seems kind of a strange idea but open your mind to the possibility.

[Saribro]

Well, you'd already be using the air to form the wing, so there wouldn't be any air left to flow around the "airwing" and be useful. IMHO

[The Nutty Professor]

Unless you purposely formed a second section of body work to funnel the air toward the wing. The problem I see is that the air in the same location has the density and how do you stop the second air flow from disrupting the first. Maybe static charge on the wing and not the funneled air. I not a aero engineer so I have no idea what I'm talking about I'm just throwing out bones

[Saribro]

and how do you stop the second air flow from disrupting the first.

My point exactly :).

[Ogami musashi]

Hello fastback,

What's the purpose of your air wing?

[Steven]

Pretty cool idea, but to have a wing you must be able to extract some force out of it.
Now suppose we ignore the downforce generated by elements to create the air wing and let's say the airwing pushes air up, how will you be able to catch the created downforce?

[zac510]

A gurney flap kind of does this already - the nature of the vortices it produces extends the chord and angle but has its effect where it is realised on the wing, which fulfil's Tomba's query!

[Ciro Pabón]

Pretty cool idea, but to have a wing you must be able to extract some force out of it.
Now suppose we ignore the downforce generated by elements to create the air wing and let's say the airwing pushes air up, how will you be able to catch the created downforce?

Good question. The only answer I can think of, is out of this world... like all my ideas. So, here we have "Ciro's ionic wing" It's an original idea, so I have little hope of it working in the real world, but...

What about ioinizing the air? You could use magnets and inductors and a "little" magnetohydrodinamics theory to "shape the air". If air is ionized you could get the force back using inductors or other magnets, if that is what Tomba asks...

I know this is differente from what was suggested by fastback33, but, hey, in principle is a good idea. I just found this:

An aerodynamic study of the "electric wind"

Interesting. So, it could be something like this "awesome" drawing of a nose cone:

Ciro's Magnetoaerodinamic wing: a grid ionizes the air, the flow, in blue, is compressed by "shaping" magnets and the resultant force is taken by "reaction" magnets.


Has this been tested? Any ideas? Should it "compress" the air, as it is "clearly" depicted, to work? Could this be used on the edges between wings with multiple elements?

Ionized air "compressed" between wings with multiple elements


Can you get any "mechanical advantage"? I mean, can you avoid the reaction in the "shaping magnets"? (if they "shape" the wind, they receive a "counterforce", I imagine). Anyway, there are some gadgets (Ionic breeze) with very low airflows (but significant ones) that work using this principle.

Finally, I imagine this gives you a way to change the properties of the boundary layer... has this been tested? Can the boundary layer be manipulated by charging or ionizing it? For example, in superconducting materials, the ionized layer is very well "defined": this is a principle of superconductivity (what it is called the penetrating depth of the magnetic field).

If this is workable, it would open a can of worms: this is no movable aerodynamic device, but, in principle, it allows you to modify your "electric" downforce by modulation of currents...

BTW, welcome, fastback33.

NOTE: On a different train of thinking, I don't know if you've heard of the use of bubbles or ultrasonic induced cavitation (Supercavitating Vehicles) to diminish friction on underwater missiles and submarines. Allegedly, US Navy is making tests and some people claim you can reach over 100 mph underwater.

I've been thinking about this for a while. Can this principle used to enhace the "lubrication" of air somehow in a car? I know you cannot create bubbles of air in the air, but can you create "bubbles of void"? Can you inject some gas on the air current that diminishes drag? Would this diminish drag, if feasible? I think of a sort of "Teflon" aerodynamic "material" (actually, it should be some kind of gas, I imagine).

Underwater Express Submarine Utilizes Bubbles for Speed


Well, and some of you thought I could not get any weirder...

[syguy]

Ciro, I think you might have something with your Ionic Wing - there are flying devices called Ionocraft that exploit an Ionic Wind (or more formally a corona discharge) to create lift. The drawback to such devices is the large voltage (KV to MV) required to ionize air - still it would make for interesting literal sparks when cars get together or refuel!

[Belatti]

fastback33, good thinking!
Maybe any "for engineering student" fluid mechanics book can help you. Search for the boundary layer chapter, even if you are far from engineering you will realise because of the pictures.

F1 cars from these days have 3 billion wings, winglets, wingies, flaps, etc in order to avoid boundary layer ruptures from laminar to turbulent flows along the car body.

[DaveKillens]

NOTE: On a different train of thinking, I don't know if you've heard of the use of bubbles or ultrasonic induced cavitation (Supercavitating Vehicles) to diminish friction on underwater missiles and submarines. Allegedly, US Navy is making tests and some people claim you can reach over 100 mph underwater.

The Russian Shkval torpedo has been operational for over a decade now... and it's velocity is estimated to be in excess of 220 MPH.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/miss ... shkval.htm

It's a nice concept to be able to manipulate the airflow through magnetism, but this approach takes energy, and magnets located in the wings. Tremendous energy required, and the mass of magnets attached to the wing structure. Both handicaps against development.[/url]

[fastback33]

WOW! i'm excited at all of the attention there is around this i was expecting maybe one post about this.... Cool guys!

well anyways here's what came into my head today for this to work.
Now say that you had sort of an active aerodynamics system where flaps would be able to form these contours on the body to form the wing. whereas these flaps will rise and lower depending on the amount of downforce the wing needs to generate aswell as giving the car's body the ability to have a very low Coefficient of drag.

As for your guys' thoughts on how to produce the wing. The thought of ionizing it came up today aswell. Something like electrifying the air from say two tiny balls that are also held in the air by a somewhat magnetic/electric "rope" or line. I suppose the hardest part with this invention is differentiating the "wing" air and the air flow to create the downforce. Any more ideas from you guys? It would be really cool if we could get some kind of program to show something like this could work!

P.s. keep the ideas flowing!!!

[Ciro Pabón]

Look at this thing (the nose cone of the russian torpedo Dave mentions, that blows air around the body, or, more precisely, part of the rocket exahust that powers it).



Now, imagine we put something similar to this contraption on the nose of an F1 car. It blows air backwards on the body. What do you measure on a wind tunnel? More, less or the same drag? What happens to downforce? Sorry for going OOT.

Now, on thread, fastback thinks about "shaping" the air. This takes me to the wiki on "Feathers" which takes me to the article on "Flight feather". I see this picture:



The caption says: "Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) in flight with primaries spread to decrease drag and improve lift." (my emphasis).

Are there any aircraft or car wings that use the same principle on the tips of the wings to to "help reduce the turbulence created by wingtip vortices", as the article states? I know modern aircraft use one sort of "vertical wingtip", but not many wingtips, as the eagle.

fastback33 talks about "various contours counter acting one another to form I guess in essence an invisible wing", so, I wonder why most birds have several, spreaded "contours" precisely there, "wings" that they deploy when soaring.

[Ogami musashi]

MHD and plasma are on the plans for F1 2011 regs.
Discharges and perpendicular magnetic fields have both capacity to produce net forces or to re attach the boundary layer, but as noted it requires lots of energy and diodes have to be carefully shaped to actually not drag by themselves.

Also, as far as i know for planes and munitions, many factors are still unknown, and recent experiences in the field of plasmas (in fluids applications) are taken with skepticism but definitely progresses are on.

On the subject of the Air wing, my problem (i may not get it right) is like tomba, i don't see how a air wing would help the body if there's no connection with the body.

The example of gurney flap is different, it modifies the airflow on the first wing with herself creates the downforce , in the example the air wing would be the creation of downforce, but if she has no mechanical link with the body she translate nothing.

One could imagine the air wing to produce a down wash but actually quite the opposite would occur so here i don't see really how this air wing would work but again maybe i got the concept wrong.



As for the eagle, in aviation works are done to use many of the specs of those aero perfect birds, Down to their bones witch are super light (by being empty) yet super stiff, we also conduct test on active aeroelastic wing, that bend and twist when you want to roll or pitch or yaw.
Morphing structure are now definitely on way (several drones are flying in test...but each one has crashed!) to have wings that change sweep, surface, thickness and profile in flight.
Flapping wings is also a topic to look for as it provides quite an economical way of moving forward, and it is not an easy topic!
Last, is also looked the feather of birds that keep the flow attached.

The very last one is the hardest of all: the brain! birds and some species specifically are able to sense the flows on their body and adapt constantly their shape.
Believe it or not,even with computers this is for the moment not possible to reproduce.


By the way a limited form of all those topic (except flapping and micro bones) are on track for formula one 2011.
The morphing topic has been discussed, and if it materialize downforce in turns and at slow speed would be increased according to ricardo while lift/drag ratio would increase a lot.

The adaptive wings following one car is a form a bird intelligence: sensors would try to adapt the wing to the state of airflows.

Quite interesting, Some Team engineers seem to think that in 2011 some of those topics are too complex to materialize tough, i do think the same (in aerospace MHD and plasmas are too far, so i don't see how it would be here in F1 in 2011!) but i'd love to see them!

[Ciro Pabón]

Thanks, Ogami, pretty interesting. A wild guess and a hit... Damn, at this pace we're never going to get a patent on anything!

Can you help me with the "Shkval torpedo" question? Will that nose and the flow of air (produced by the car and, thus, reacting against it, I have to annotate) change drag?

Now, about the diodes and its drag "by themselves", this is a photo of a shark's skin... Mighty interesting (the "drawings" in white, on top of the photo, are my amateur assumptions about how it works).



It reminds me vaguely of an F1 nose (the flow of water, I imagine, goes from top right to bottom left). Notice how the scales are "overlapping" a little. They seem designed to create pools of stagnant water between scales (to thicken the boundary layer? To control its thickness? To make a twisted path for it and keep it attached?). Perhaps the diodes (or whatever) on the skin could be shaped to get some advantage of them. Of course, this scales seem also designed to "cut" if you touch them at any angle, and I don't know if this is its primary function.

BTW, I'm sorry, McLaren fans, I only got a Ferrari shark's photo (I looked for one with silver scales, but I could not find one ).

Another wild guess: sharks use electric fields as a "sixth sense" we are not familiar with. May they use it for "shaping" the water somehow? Or to "feel" it, as the birds feel the airflow?