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Professor Moble Benedict of the Texas A&M Flight Laboratory and his team successfully developed a small rolling-wing aircraft with a total body weight of only 29 grams.
This may be another advancement to replace helicopters and multi-axis aircraft.
As far as the current situation is concerned, everyone has a solid idea about the shape of the aircraft. It is nothing more than using single-axis or multi-axis propellers to generate power, such as helicopters, multi-rotor UAVs and so on. As for the "roller-propelled" aircraft, it may be relatively unfamiliar. The propellers used in the "rotor-propelled" aircraft (cyclocopter) of the
rolling-wing UAV are
a bit special. They are academically called "cycloidal propellers". The propellers are made into a "roller" combined rotation to generate thrust and lift. At first glance, many people may think this thing is particularly novel, but this concept was proposed about a century ago, and it was not until the emergence of helicopters and multi-axis aircraft that it was gradually forgotten by people.
At present, only a small part of the scientific research team is doing research on rolling wing aircraft. Professor Moble Benedict and his team at the Texas A&M Flight Laboratory are one of them. Recently, they successfully developed a small rolling wing. The overall weight of the aircraft is only 29 grams. This may be another advancement to replace helicopters and multi-axis aircraft. Don't say much, look at things first.
The picture above is the state of the entire aircraft in flight. If you still don’t understand how the rolling wing makes the UAV fly, you can probably understand it by looking at the picture below.
Eight propellers are concentrated on a drum-like structure. When the drum is autobiography, each propeller will change accordingly. The high-speed rolling of the drum makes the air flowing through the upper and lower wing surfaces produce a flow velocity difference, which generates powerful reasoning at the bottom. Make the drone take off. At the same time, the airflow that pushes the drum backward during operation can generate forward thrust.
Moble Benedict has been engaged in the research of rolling-wing aircraft for many years. He said that in theory, the rolling-wing method has higher kinetic energy efficiency, lower power consumption, and at the same time it will be quieter, more space-saving, more stable, and the speed is almost the same as that of a helicopter. .
Moble Benedict said that at present they have proved that due to the special structure of the rolling-wing aircraft, its aerodynamic conversion efficiency is much higher than that of traditional helicopters, and its maneuverability is stronger, and its ability to control direction and speed is better. It is much different from traditional helicopters.
Speaking of this, everyone must have a question. Since this thing has so many benefits and drones and aircraft have been developed for so long, why hasn't this method been adopted on a large scale?
Moble Benedict’s answer is that people have tried to explore rolling-wing aircraft for more than a hundred years, but in the early 20th century, the huge success and wide application of helicopters made people interested in the research of rolling-wing drones. In addition, the rolling-wing UAV had a fatal problem in the early days, that is, its propeller wing structure was relatively complicated and lack of suitable flight control stability during operation. Now that the technology has matured, this aspect is no longer a problem. They have developed the corresponding gyroscopes, accelerators, processors, etc., and have debugged their internal software for a long time. Now the stability is almost the same as that of drones on the market.
In addition, the aerodynamic force of the blades of the rolling-wing aircraft in the past was relatively large, and there was no suitable material for this load-bearing. However, with the development of technology and the emergence of various compatible materials, this problem has been solved. Up. They used innovative carbon fiber composite materials to make paddles in the experiment, each with only 0.12 grams.
The future research direction,
Professor Moble Benedict, said that in the future, more sophisticated research will be carried out around the rolling-wing aircraft, so as to make this drone more perfect and more practical.
First, they will conduct research on materials and design lighter and stronger blades to increase their load capacity under high-speed rotation.
Second, the structure of the rolling-wing aircraft needs to be streamlined to make it simpler, at least not as complicated as it is currently.
In addition, the design of the shape of the blade is related to the state and efficiency of the UAV under hovering and high-speed flight. This aspect needs to be improved.
Professor Benedict said that they have proven the future potential of this kind of rolling-wing flight. One of their next goals is to carry out rolling-wing experiments on large aircraft, which will also extend to manned aircraft in the future. They have now received financial support from the US military.
In fact, aircraft using cycloid pulp as lift have also appeared in the past two years. At the 2014 Fifth UAV Conference Exhibition, a rolling wing aircraft named Hot Wheels was very eye-catching. The aircraft also used two A cycloidal propeller is the source of lift and is used for aileron control at the same time, and a propeller is used for pitch control and yaw control. However, this aircraft was only a concept aircraft at the time, and there has been no news in the past two years.
At a time when the form of Chinese Hot Wheels
aircraft (especially consumer drones) has been solidified, many of the drone research carried out by many practitioners is "old wine in new bottles", and has not done much in form. Thoughts, including many conceptual flying cars also use the design of ordinary multi-rotor drones, which is boring. Professor Benedict said that when the technology of rolling-wing aircraft matures, it will be more suitable for flying cars and other directions than traditional aircraft, and the future prospects will be very broad.
(Source: Lei Feng Net)