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Posts Tagged ‘airplane wings’

So far, it's just an idea

The aviation firm unveiled its 2030 Concept Plane earlier this week, which includes dreams of a self-cleaning cabin; extra-long, slim wings; a U-shaped tail; and an intelligent fuselage designed to improve efficiency.

Airbus acknowledges the plane is somewhat a flight of fancy, but it’s worth imagining how aviation would look if advancements in existing technologies “continue apace,” as the company puts it.

Some of the concepts:

Smart seats made from plant fibers, which could change shape to offer a comfortable fit
See-through walls that offer passengers a 360-degree view
Fuel cells, “cryo-power,” and even human body heat to provide power
Self-cleaning materials that use beads of water to remove dirt and pathogens
Holographic projections of virtual decors, allowing travelers to transform their private cabin into an office, bedroom or Zen garden

“It’s not a real aircraft and all the technologies it features, though feasible, are not likely to come together in the same manner. Here we are stretching our imagination and thinking beyond our usual boundaries,” says Charles Champion, vice president of engineering at Airbus, in a press statement.

Accompanying the concept plane is a futurist document (PDF) that would make Burt Rutan blush. "Futurologist" Robin Mannings envisions planes flying in formation like a flock of geese; flying aircraft carriers used for long-distance flights, which would allow small aircraft to dock; cryo-planes powered by hydrogen; and more.

He even suggests flying cruise ships, complete with casinos and entertainment, which might generate enough revenue to make the tickets free.

Here's hoping these planes of the future look as cool as this design.

[Airbus via Smart Planet]

Using computer algorithms, MIT researchers have designed a foam glider with a single motor on its tail that can perch like a bird. The work has implications for robotic planes, potentially allowing them to recharge their batteries by perching on power lines, according to MIT News.

Watch a bird careening through the trees, and you might wonder how it can suddenly stop and alight on a single branch. There are certainly no flying machines capable of such aerobatics.

It’s because birds take advantage of a phenomenon called stall -- not a word you usually want to hear in aviation.

Birds come to a stop by tilting their wings back at sharp angles. This creates turbulence and large, unpredictable whirlwinds behind the wings. If an airplane pointed its wings up in this way, it would lose lift and fall out of the sky. But MIT researchers wanted to take advantage of stall -- specifically, post-stall drag -- to help a plane come to a controlled landing.

It’s difficult to predict how the wing whirlwinds will manifest, so MIT Associate Professor Russ Tedrake, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Rick Cory, a PhD student in Tedrake’s lab, had to model what a stall looks like.

They also found they had to create error-correction controls to tweak the glider’s path in case it deviated from its flight plan. Using algorithms developed at MIT, they were able to calculate the degree of deviation that the controls could compensate for, MIT News says. The result is a model that looks like a series of tubes, which includes all the possible trajectories and the tolerance of the error-correction controls.

Once the glider is launched, it keeps checking its position and executing the command that corresponds to the flight path “tube” it is in.

To stop, it tilts itself up in a dangerous-looking stall and wafts forward, ultimately reaching a tiny perch, where it alights.

The team used wall-mounted cameras and an external computer to monitor the glider’s position and run the control algorithms. To expand the technology to robotic airplanes that interest the Air Force, more powerful on-board processors would be needed. Meanwhile, Tedrake's lab has already begun to address moving the glider's location sensors onboard, according to CSAIL.

[MIT]