3 ms·
One interesting feature about this, which you can see in the skeletal hovering demo machine, is that all the ducts are driven from a central source. Since air p
by imglorp 6y ago
One interesting feature about this, which you can see in the skeletal hovering demo machine, is that all the ducts are driven from a central source. Since air pressure is additive, that source could be multiple engines dumping into a single manifold before driving all the ducts equally by default. All the ducts need to do is swivel to direct the air.
Compare this to ships like the V22 which have an immensely complicated gear, shaft, and clutch arrangement to drive the props; this one also folds. Or against most multi rotors including the original Moller design where you need at least 8 engines or motors, two at each corner for safety, where you need a smart computer to balance the loads as motors fail.
- m4rtink 6y agoYeah, having tha actual repellers/propulsors be both lightweight and more or less arbitrary shape could enable quite some nifty designs! Also as you just need pressurized Gass in the manifold for the thing to fly I wonder if an emergency system with a pressure bottle or even gas generator could be used to give you say 30 seconds of flight time needed for safe emergency landing if your pressure generating engine fails. Not to mention making it easier to combine two or more independent engines to feed the manifold for redundancy without the crazy complicated and heavy gearing V22 has to achieve that, as mention above.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- robotresearcher 6y agoA single source of pressure means that the available pressure at each outlet is not independent (unless the source pressure has huge headroom). This could make control interestingly complex.
- aclatuts 6y agoThey could add an independently closable duct at each outlet.
- robotresearcher 6y agoClosing one outlet increases the pressure on the others, if the supply pressure is not ~infinity.
- hinkley 6y agoHVAC systems are, I'm told, an NP complete problem. Every time you increase flow in one vent the flow in all the others has to be rebalanced. Although with only 4 ducts you might expect that problem space to be solved.