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Old 06-04-2007 | 10:35 AM
  #20  
victorzamora
 
Joined: Oct 2006
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From: Greenville, SC
Default RE: Reversing rotation on a glow engine

I didn't mean rotational energy, or torque of the engine...what I meant was Mechanical Torque, like a see-saw. A 200-lb man sitting two feet from the fulcrum has the same torque as a fifty pound child sitting 8 feet from the fulcrum. In a twin-engine aircraft...two engines pulling the same force at the same distance from the centerline (fulcrum) cancel the yaw-torquing but add forward momentum. Now, if you lose an engine, the plane will yaw towards the LOST engine. P-factor there will cause the plane to want to roll even more to that side. Have you ever noticed that, unless a plane is a 3D monster, when you input rudder in straight-and-level flight that it will yaw and roll? P-factor, accelerated slipstream, and many other things make that happen. The accelerated slipstream also increases lift in the wing, at the point behind the engine, on the still-functional side...rolling the aircraft FURTHER in the opposite direction. On a non-counterrotating twin-engine plane, losing an engine creates EVERY ASPECT OF AERODYNAMIC FLIGHT to fight to roll/yaw the plane to that side. If the side of the prop swinging downwards is farther away than the side swinging upwards, it will create more torque (again, NOT torque from the engine....mechanical torque, like a crow-bar or a see-saw. you know, leverage??) than in the opposite case. So, if the props rotate inwards the unequal leverage is less than if the props rotated outwards due to a larger distance from the centerline. Just, read the links below.
Wikipedia isn't a guaranteed place to look for correct information, but this happened to be EXACTLY what i was talking about. And the pictures are OBVIOUSLY not as good as my pieces of art, which deserve to be in the Louvre ASAP, but they'll do just fine. I think it does a pretty good job of explaining what I mean. By the way, this is not where I got my info from the first time.

The site for Critical Engine is: [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_engine]Critical Engine[/link]
The site for p-factor is:[link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-factor]p-factor[/link]