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Hot wings foil airfoil

Spinning cylinders give aircraft a lift
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It is well known that a spinning, dimpled golf ball gets added height when its backspin causes "Magnus lift." There have also been some attempts to use vertical, rotating, cylindical sails on cargo ships.

In the same way, one or more horizontal pairs of thin, spinning, cylinder "wings" could be used on airplanes to provide lift instead of airfoils. The correct r.p.m. would provide maximum lift with minimum drag (preferably less than an airfoil) and be dependent on forward velocity. Rear control surfaces would still be needed such as aerolons and flaps.

FarmerJohn, Apr 15 2002

Fan wing http://www.fanwing.com/
Found it. Not exactly Magnus effect, but similar. [omegatron, Nov 08 2004]

lift of rotating cylinder http://www.grc.nasa...2/airplane/cyl.html
AWOL's link from Bernoullimobile [FarmerJohn, Apr 04 2005]

[link]






       Sure this wouldn't also introduce large amounts of drag?
mcscotland, Apr 15 2002
  

       Well I'm thinking thinner than airfoil wings, and the upper and lower spinning surfaces should cancel each other out drag-wise.
FarmerJohn, Apr 15 2002
  

       FarmerJohn - eh? The spinning of the cylinder will only ever increase drag - and there'll be loads of drag to start with. You're gonna need a pretty powerful engine to provide the forward velocity to enable this to work. I can't see that it's ever going to be as efficient as a normal wing. The thing would be if it provided much increased lift at lowers speeds. You would then sacrifice the efficiency to get that low speed cruising - cos it would still probably be cheaper than a helicopter. You'd need to know what kind of lift force this produces compared to a normal wing of comparable size.
goff, Apr 15 2002
  

       So this has nothing to do with chicken, then.
waugsqueke, Apr 15 2002
  

       I thought of this, too.   

       It's sort of baked, though. The baked design has vaned cylinders, like a blower impeller, and then has a thing that rotates around to direct the airflow. So it's capable of near vertical take off. Unfortunately, I can't find it. Post a link if you do. They have working models. (I found it. See the link.)
omegatron, Nov 08 2004
  
      
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