Playing around with the Horton wing today and wondered if I could skin the aerofoil instead of using a KF foil. My drama with the KF is that the Horton wing is quite narrow, too many steps in the foil will cause a lot of drag and also interfere with the control surfaces.
A flying wing must have the centre of gravity and turning moment infront of the main body of lift to maintain stability. This causes a nose down attitude, therefore most wings have a slight 'up elevon' control to keep the tail down and the wing level. The Hortons used a reflexed aerofoil shape which is a lot more efficient.
My concern with the KF foil wing was that the coarse steps would interfere with the control surfaces too much and require them to be overly large and therefore too twitchy to control whilst causing un-necessary drag.
As can be seen below, by adding a simple balsa spar at 30% chord, a 3mm sheet of depron can be forced over the plan and create a near perfect reflexed and semi-symmetrical aerofoil - this is something I am definitely going to persue over the KF foil !
No comments:
Post a Comment