#Cambered airfoil zip

#Cambered airfoil zip

Now it hardly took much of a throw at all to zip up into the openings and then transition to the glide.įor me it was a good lesson in how camber plays with drag.īut you're working from a whole other starting point. I then went to 1/16 sanded out to taper to either side and reduced the camber to about 1/4 inch. I can say it was that since the roof support ironwork trusses started at that height and I just could not get the model to climb up into the gaps without using enough energy that I literally tore off a wing. The glide was nice and slow but I had a heck of a time getting the model to climb higher than about 18 feet.

I seem to recall that I was using 3/8 inch of camber in a simple circular arc over a 4 inch root chord. One design used wings made from 1/32 sheet with the root and one rib to either side holding in the camber. More years back than I want to consider I was making and flying a lot of my own designs for a low ceiling indoor site. But there's no hard 'number' where the world suddenly drags to a halt. Otherwise it'll strongly want to spring back towards a simple arm shape at the edges. If you want to play with the stronger edge focused elliptical style cambers I think you'll pretty much NEED to heat form it in this way if you want to maintain any sort of intended shape. Not sure how hot it has to get but it was a common method in the home made foam forum where people were doing this on the thin blue fan fold foam. But I understand that 'baking' the sheet over a suitable form can lock the shape into the foam. With stronger curves you're going to find that you need a lot of ribs to avoid the curve trying to flatten back out between the ribs. But hey, it's only a buck or two to try it. I'm sort of thinking that you won't see a whole lot of change from a simple arc to a strongly edge curved elliptical shape. Then try some options such as a truncated ellipse. I'd go with around a 5 to 6% arc to start with. With curved plate shapes too much just gives you a lot more drag without a whole lot of improvement in the lift you can generate.