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New Powered Glider Concept



I Although I now have a Radian glider. It's quite difficult to find open places where you're able to practice your flying. So i decided to design a new airframe that will be able to keep my flight hours up without having to travel far.

The aim was to make a cheap. light and yet strong powered plane that, if needed, would be able to carry the autopilot board. The airframe was made of foam core, 160gsm board paper, packaging tape and dowel sticks.



It was decided to sandwich the fuselage body section where the electronics where going to be with 3mm balsa wood sheets. Then openings were made for the ESC, LIPO battery, two servos (elevator and rudder) and Specktrum 6210 receiver.

The wing attachment is also different from my previous design with dowels acting as load points with 2mm wood screws connecting fuselage and wing. High pressure axial loads existed only through the dowel stick structure and then transferred through transverse shear loads. This should in theory prevent high impact landing from damaging the wing itself.

Apart from the main wing, only the horizontal tail can be detached from fuselage. It remains in place through shear strength of the adhesive tape transferring loads to the rest of the structure (in particular the vertical tail).

A foldable propeller design was used so that in the event of motor shut-off (especially during landings) no structure damage will occur at the nose of the aircraft (if I knew this earlier!). This is attached to the fuselage using two dowel sticks. So the axial loads from the motor are converted to shear loads over a larger area through the balsa sheet.

Below are some pics of the almost finished glider.

















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Comments

  1. Unknown6 April 2014 at 00:26

    This is pretty cool!
    How do you come up with the measurements for the aircraft that will guarantee its ability to glide ? are there specific glider ratios to use..? or are these standard glider dimensions?

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    Replies
    1. pkantue23 September 2014 at 14:33

      Hye Francis, Nice to see you've been following my blog. (Thanks). To answer your question, aircraft (glider) design a trying to get a balance between various factors like weight, glide speed and dimensions. It's an art on its own to master although there are many proven designs in which you can start from. Check out http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=542020

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