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Old 01-30-2011 | 10:15 AM
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BMatthews
 
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From: Chilliwack, BC, CANADA
Default RE: Plane project

Um... I just noticed in re-reading your first post the reference to "scale commercial aircraft".  So this is more about trying to model full size plane crash damage and an egg is the payload you're trying to protect?  Then you can forget about the whole show right now.  If the goal is to replicate and study how full size aircraft can protect the cargo by sheding parts to absorb the energy of the impact then your egg is hardly a good indicator of the sort of human cargo that you're trying to protect.  And model structures made from our usual wood, foam or fiberglass just don't "shed" in the same way during a crash due to the wildly different design and construction methods used.  Not to mention the differences in how the forces affect the model due to the size scale and mass moments. 

To do such a study properly you'd need to replicate the full size structure using material analogs that rip and tear in a manner that can be equated to the aluminium parts used in the full size aircraft and factor in the shifts in mass-moments and try to equate the way that the parts shed and related this to the full size aircraft.  Just finding such material, or using actual aluminium in reduced section sizes, is far, far, far beyond the scope of anything you'll find in the hobby model airplane world.   And equating how such a model were to perform to how the larger and heavier full size aircraft would work makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.  There's so many factors that I'm not even sure a model of anything much smaller than 1/4 scale would even give results that are actually useable.

First time around I had read this to be that you wanted to make a model that would fly in a rough field and land without damaging an egg.  I figured that it was another one of the oddball airplane related school contests or lab assignments that seem to be so popular these days.  And if that is the case then designing a model and flying it with an egg as the prototype is not hard with some packing and accepted model design.   The only thing that would make it interesting would be if there were a severe weight and size limit placed on the design of such a model. 

If I'm wildly out in both interpretations then how about filling us in more on how this got started. the sort  of size of the model and what the goal is intended to achieve.  Because as it seems now it's just a wild goose chase with no meaningful outcome.