IDFuel, the Industrial Design Weblog - Post details: External Support

External Support

05/18/05

Ultralightweight designs inhabit a peculiar world. It is full of unkowns demanding feats of strength from trembling factors of safety; founded upon deceptively simple parameters. To succeed here, we pursue any evidence of excess weight with Farley Mowatt-like persistence. But designers needn't face these challenges alone. This is the time to look for External Support.
051705_main

Though bouncing ideas off of your friends may help spark your creativity, the support we're after is a bit more literal: high tension loadbearing structures. Kenneth Snelson distills the issue, via his sculptures, into the balance between tension and compression. His floating compression structures, in which no two compression members ever touch (R. Bucky Fuller called it 'tensegrity'), present a concise visualization of the forces at work and merit a closer look, but we haven't the time for that!

Snelson's work may appear to be floating, but it is actually well grounded. On the other hand, our featured example IS, more or less, ACTUALLY floating.

The Gossamer Albatross, a human-powered airplane, was the first to fly across the English Channel. Paul MacCready Jr. began designing the craft in 1976, and though the design WAS a collaborative one, those aspects are well detailed in Gossamer Odyssey. What is neat about the Gossamer Condor and its progeny the Albatross (aside from its Coleridge implications) is how it came about and why.

Two key points in human powered flight (IHPVA) are power and drag. Human power output peaks around 1.5 horsepower (hp) instantaneously, though sustained efforts can only provide 0.5hp or so. Think of this in comparison to what your car can produce! SO, since power output is so low, efficiency is IMPORTANT! Then there are two types of drag on aircraft: parasitic and induced. Induced drag is that caused by generating lift, while parasitic drag is frictional air resistance. Human powered aircraft before 1976 generally resembled sailplanes. They were smoothe & streamlined. They really LOOKED like planes, the reason being that they were trying to minimize parasitic drag.

But MacCready had other ideas. He realized that the key to Human Powered Flight lay in creating a LARGE, lightweight wing. The parasitic drag so avoided by glider designers was less important than the wing loading (weight of plane/wing area) due to the slow flight speeds. In an effort to increase the wing area while DECREASING the weight, he borrowed the external rigging idea from Hang Gliders. Thusly, the base structure of the Gossamer plane is a three dimensional cross (picture an xyz-axis) which connects all six endpoints with piano wire. This structure gives the ungainly bird its form. Extended masts and bowspirit provided the requisite support in the same way that a sailboat mast is stabilized by guy-wires.

MacCready prioritized lift and low weight over drag and resulted in a feasible solution for human powered flight. With this external rigging and about three years of designing, crashing, and rebuilding, the Albatross succeeded in crossing the channel under human power and over the waves. And so it may look like it is flying backwards, but it gets the job done!

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