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Old 06-25-2007 | 11:32 PM
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BMatthews
 
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From: Chilliwack, BC, CANADA
Default RE: musing

I'm not sure it works that way here. Let's look at your favourite flat foamies which I've also started flying in the quest to learn to prop hang/hover.

The model weighs around 8 to 10 oz as I recall. But to counter act the torque while hovering at my 8 to 10 oz of thrust I only need to use perhaps 15 degrees of aileron. I'd be very willing to bet that the prop blast over that small area at a 15 degree angle isn't anywhere near an 8 to 10 foot/oz of torque.

Just for the heck of it I plugged some numbers that may or may not make sense into a servo torque calculator. I used 30 mph as an outside number for the prop blast speed, 15 degrees surface deflection on a 2.5 inch wide by 6 inch long surface (the part in the prop blast) and 15 degree max servo deflection so it would indicate a 1:1 control horn to servo arm overall. The servo load calculation came back as only 1.22 inch oz of torque. Double that for two surfaces and it's still only 2.44 in-oz of torque. Somehow that doesn't seem to correlate with a prop that's generating 8 to 10 oz of thrust.

So.... I went to Foilsim, my favourite airfoil lift program for playing, and plugged some numbers in....

A 2/3:1/3 wing:aileron at 15 degrees with a chord of 9 inchs forms a roughly equivalent flat arc section of 5% and 5 degree angle of attack. With my mythical 30 mph prop blast blowing over it this panel will generate JUST OVER ONE LB OF LIFT ! ! ! ! I would not have thought it would be that high. Now of course all this is based on the blast being at 30 mph. I found an Emotor calculator that makes it look like 30 mph is a little high. At what appears to be a more realistic 25 mph prop blast at the throttle setting to hover the wing segment in the blast appears to be generating just under .8 lbs of lift to hold the model from spinning or a total of 1.57 lbs of lift to prevent a hovering model of around 10 oz from spinning.

So it would appear that we do indeed have a winner and that it takes more "lift" to hold the model from torque rolling than it does to keep it hovering.

Now mind you if I'm way off on my camber and induced angle of attack then it may not all fit. For example if we reduce the deflection to 7 degrees that reduces the camber and AoA to 3% and 2.5 degrees. At the same 25 mph prop blast we now have the two sides adding up to a total of just over .8 lbs of lift for a more or less 1 to 1. A big change.

But barring some real numbers that we can use to get better answers it would appear that the lift needed to counter the torque related to the thrust is more or less equal to or exceeds the force of the thrust.