Originally posted by daven
I am always looking for an advantage in regards to speed in my racing planes.
I have a way of setting up my racers (with a single aileron servo) so that the ailerons ONLY move up and not down.
My question is? Is it cleaner (faster) having one aileron move up quite a bit, rather than having one move up, and the other moving down?
Or, is the gain so minimal as to not be worth pursueing.
If we are talking about speed, we are talking about drag. If you move one aileron 20 degres, the "wet" surface should be about the same than moving 2 ailerons 10 degres. What is cleaner is to have a deeper (in chord) aileron, so that you can get the same result by moving it 5 degres instead of 10.
The benefits of having ailerons moving only up, from my point of view, are not about drag, but about adverse yaw (Should not have any), and the ability to have ailerons AND full wingspan flaps (as you can have up-aileron-only forward the trailing edge), but I doubt that those results are of any interest in your search for speed.
Bernard