Ok, as promised, here is the second part, Flygen or 'Drag Mode' machines, here is a video that Corey of SwissKitePower pointed me to (thanks Corey!), featuring one of Makani Power's wings in much more detail than I had seen previously. Let get straight to it.
As you can see, they have moved well away from the fabric kite, groundgen approach they took at the start and the system now much more closely resembles a UAV. There is a strong dihedral, (the wings point up) on the horizontal stabilisers at the back there, and a lighter diherdral on the main wings. The 'fuselage' for want of a better word seems to be a large composite pole, I don't know if it really takes two people to lift it or if they are just being careful.
The next obvious video to post would be of Joby Energy's prototypes, but there are no embeddable videos up on youtube so you'll have to look here instead. There's a couple of nice video's of really agile free flight and self powered VTOL which I would assume is more scaleable than being shot into the air with compressed air, but what do I know?!....(edit 02/aug/10, makani's site now shows a full vtol concept with landing cradle, so clearly they are not planning on relying on the current scheme indefinitely!)
I'll do some basic comparison between the 2 approaches tomorrow, with a bit of reference to Loyd to bring it all together.
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About Me
- Allister Furey
- I finished my PhD on Evolutionary Robotics in Airborne Wind Energy applications in 2010. Since then I have been working in industry in the area.
Come on Allister, lets get that comparison up there, can't keep the public waiting !!
ReplyDeleteHey Colm,sounds like a plan- you debug my code and I'll do the comparison!
ReplyDeleteNo really, I'll do the next post this evening after work...
Taps foot, glances at watch.
ReplyDeleteHope your code has been debugged.
Great site btw.
www.makanipower.com has been updated - plenty of more information and videos :)
ReplyDelete