Web Concepts

Posts Tagged ‘aircraft’

This is useful because atom interferometers are super sensitive, more so than the inertial sensors used widely on modern aircraft. Those inertial sensors have been known to fail with potentially disastrous results, but more frequently they cause slight errors to creep into navigation systems that must later be corrected. With no moving parts and a high degree of accuracy, atom interferometers could mitigate these problems, recording inertial effects 300 times weaker than the normal fluctuations in the acceleration in a standard aircraft.

But the vibrations in an aircraft have previously made deployment of atom interferometers in planes unfeasible. That’s where Remi Geiger at the Laboratoire Charles Fabry in Paris comes in. He and his colleagues have created a system that compensates for the effects of vibrations via mechanical accelerometers that record the movements of the aircraft itself.

Using that vibration data, their system recalculates the interferometer’s data to compensate for any vibration that might be skewing its final result. By stripping out the vibration noise, they end up with a clean, high-resolution atom interferometer result. The system could go a long way toward delivering better acceleration data to the cockpits of large jets. Geiger and company have already tested their system successfully on an Airbus A300.

But an atom interferometer that can operate free of laboratory constraints isn’t limited to jetliner applications. The researchers hope their method will lead to more precise measurements of geodesy and of gravity itself, enabling some fundamental experiments that have been previously very difficult to conduct and challenging some existing principles of physics with more and better data. More at arXiv.

[Technology]

Boeing has orders for 821 of these Dreamliners, which fly 52 percent farther than the all-metal 767 aircraft they're replacing, while using 20 percent less fuel thanks to their carbon fiber design. Other upgrades include better cabin air, electronically dimmable windows, a more efficient turbofan engine with fewer fan blades and Android-based entertainment systems.

Even though the ultra-light composite technology has become popular among other airlines, including Airbus, three years worth of expensive delays won't be easy on Boeing. They'll need to sell a lot of the Dreamliners in order to recoup their losses.

[Reuters]

Boeing has orders for 821 of these Dreamliners, which fly 52 percent farther than the all-metal 767 aircraft they're replacing, while using 20 percent less fuel thanks to their carbon fiber design. Other upgrades include better cabin air, electronically dimmable windows, a more efficient turbofan engine with fewer fan blades and Android-based entertainment systems.

Even though the ultra-light composite technology has become popular among other airlines, including Airbus, three years worth of expensive delays won't be easy on Boeing. They'll need to sell a lot of the Dreamliners in order to recoup their losses.

[Reuters]

Clickhere to launch a gallery of auto-gyros, gyroplanes, autogiros, or whatever they're called, from the PopSci archives

The MTOsport is headquartered in Tomball, Texas, and at $75,000 costs a fraction of what a police force would spend on a helicopter. Operating costs are low too, at just $50 an hour, largely because it runs on regular pump gas.

The roofless, doorless contraption uses a rear-mounted propeller for speed, and an unpowered, angled rotor, spinning at 80 to 120 RPM, uses the air pushed into the blades from forward motion to create lift. It needs a little more than a hundred yards to take off, and then climbs into the air at a rate of 13 feet per second, eventually hitting speeds of up to 115 mph. Despite the lack of roof, the auto-gyro is arguably safer than a helicopter because it's always in autorotation. If power is lost, helicopter pilots have to ease their aircrafts down and hope that autorotation engages. The MTOsport would just glide down gently.

On the downside, no roofs or doors means riding in bad weather will be rough, and without thermal imaging cameras or large light beams, auto-gyros are best flown during the day. Even with these limitations though, the cost and efficiency of the auto-gyro makes it incredibly helpful for police forces in underserved areas like Tomball. The MTOsport can be in the air and on a mission within 10 minutes, and, in terms of coverage, is equal to the deployment of 20 officers, according to Tomball's chief of police.

[Jalopnik]

The 787 has been undergoing work for years now. Boeing doesn't actually roll out all that many entirely new models: only eleven to date. The 787, in case you haven't been reading our coverage, promises to be a lighter-weight (due to its carbon fiber body), more fuel-efficient, and more comfortable aircraft, with Boeing making improvements in everything from air quality to seating arrangements.

It's had a rocky birth, with everything from smoke in the cabin to those aforementioned sparks getting in the way of this certification, but the FAA gave its blessing on Friday and Boeing says it'll begin shipping the planes on September 26th.

Created by Tobita Hiroaki and his team at Sony, the blimp (which is still nameless) shows a projection of the telepresence-r's face on a meter-wide balloon. (Hiroaki says his colleagues find talking to such a large floating head "very strange.") It works generally like all blimps do, powered by a few small propellers located underneath the balloon. It's controlled remotely, with a webcam on the user's face updating live, and broadcasts audio through a built-in speaker.

The idea is to solve a problem most telepresence robots, like the Anybots, have: stairs. Getting a robot to climb stairs is a hell of a challenge, and to keep costs down, telepresence robots like the Anybots robot generally just use non-stair-compatible wheels. So why not merely float over them instead? The project is still very much in development, but could be pretty useful for remote monitoring and things like that. Hopefully it works better than our recent misadventure in telepresence, regardless of how much we enjoyed the frustrated liveblog.

[New Scientist]

If you can print an airplane, what can't you print?

This marks just one of many recent developments that are quickly rendering “rapid prototyping” an obsolete term. Once used to churn out prototype parts in plastics and resins before actual objects were machined from metal blocks, experts in the field now say 20 percent of the output of the world’s 3-D printers is final products, and that’s expected to rise to 50 percent by 2020. In other words, people are prototyping and manufacturing on the same machines.

This is chiefly due to developments that allow modern 3-D printers to turn out finished objects in media ranging from the high-grade titanium alloys necessary for aircraft construction to glass, plastics, concrete, and even frosting. Printing finished parts saves on production costs because there is dramatically less waste (especially in the case of airframe components, which can leave up to 90 percent of a block of pricey titanium on the machine shop floor) and it allows manufacturers to tweak designs or customize parts at a fraction of the cost of re-tooling a machining process.

But printing a jetliner wing is something else altogether. If EADS (the maker of Airbus) figures out how to print their airframes, wings, and other components in a way that’s demonstrably as safe as machining their parts, they could build significantly lighter, more efficient aircraft at lower costs. It’s also within the realm of possibility that the company could build an entire aircraft--piece by piece--in one place, sidestepping some of the supply-chain problems that have delayed the Airbus A380.

Of course, what’s good for EADS could be good for a variety of manufacturing enterprises; if you could print an airline wing that can stand up to wind-tunnel tests, you could print just about anything. 3-D printing lowers the cost of entry into manufacturing for any number of enterprises and simplifies what’s possible with a good design program and a good idea. But don’t take it from us. As aspiring innovator Schuyler St. Leger explains below, there’s a lot to love about the explosion of 3-D printing technology.

[Economist]