HOW WINGS WORK AND LIFT FORMULAS

FOR

AIRPLANES AND HELICOPTER WINGS

 Copy write 9/22/1998 Frank R. Naypaver

In the quest of designing a human powered helicopter. It became apparent that the physics involving wing design and lift taught in schools and colleges is flawed. The only valid information comes from wind tunnel testing a variety of airfoils, and graphing them at a variety of attack angles and air speeds. Unfortunately modelers and inventors don’t share the same demands on airfoils as aerospace companies and the airplane industries. So the laminar flow and lift characteristics of a DC-10 wing is of little use to low air speed plane wing developers. Further the Bernoulli lift concept where lift is caused by the curved top of the wing, is in error and can simply be disregarded when figuring out what makes a air plane fly. Consider if the contour of the top of the wing was solely responsible for the lift of the wing then inverting the wing would cause negative lift no airplane could fly upside down. All airplanes are capable of inverted flight. Proving that lift does not come from the air foil of the wing, but the angle of attack the wing has to the air flow. The operation of the airfoil is to reduce air drag and allow the wing to move through the air at different angles and speeds efficiently it is called being aerodynamic, and pertains to anything moving through a fluid medium and is not to be confused with lift. The formula for the lift of a wing, evolves from the idea of the wing displacing its weight in air mass, like a balloon. But a balloon statically displaces air mass where the wing must accomplish the same, by movement through the air. The lift is from the air molecules striking the bottom of the wing at some angel of attack. Like billiard balls deflecting off toward the ground and reacting on the wing as lift in the opposite direction. From the length, forward speed, an width of the wing, and knowing the angle of air attack one can easily predict the cubic feet of air mass the wing will displace as it moves forward through the air. Geometric analysis of this process show that the tangent of the attack angle is the lift vector. This is reasonable because the tangent of zero degrees is (0) zero producing zero lift from the formula, and tangent of 45 degrees attack angle is (1) one or 100% lift mass efficience. So if we take the volume of air mass contacting, and being displaced by the bottom of the wing per second, times the air particle deflection vector per second we will attain a value for lift in the form of foot pounds per second squared. Dividing this by the acceleration of gravity / 32 feet per second squared, we get lift in pounds. Converted for horse power the base formula value is divided by /.0018 foot pound per seconds giving HP per second. So the formula yields some useful comparable values.

I have produced a computer program that uses this formula to predict lift for air plains and helicopters, it is available on the website to down load. This early version will predict only flat wing lift for airplanes. I am planing to correct it later when I learn how to get angular point to point graph information from the NACA wing form codes. Which will use percent of cord information to predict the wings leading edge lift which with it’s greater angles of attack give greater lift to a wing. This can be proven by putting your hand out a window of a speeding car, just the area of your hand can produce great amounts of lift, consider what the small area of your hand extended twenty feet would be like at sixty miles per hour. In the helicopter wing lift calculator the flat wing calculations are pretty good because the helicopter has small thin wings and the leading edge of the wing is small and does not add a great amount of lift to the overall rotor. But the NACA wing codes could improve on those to.

Copy write 9/22/1998 Frank R. Naypaver

 In helicopters there is swing and load mechanism between the hub and the inside edge of the rotor, so three to four feet of the rotor blade length is in a no lift zone and should be subtracted from the total blade lifting ability. Also the inner rotor edge speed of helicopters is a lot less than the rotor tip speed. A average should be taken by considering two blades lifting ability as that of one blade.

These formulas predict the best lift possible for a given attack angle and wing size. A good air foil helps get the actual lift nearer to this ideal value, a bad air foil will defeat some of the lift because air molecules above the wing will be pushed down by surrounding air molecules into the void left by the moving wing, and collide with the wing, in a counter clockwise motion counter acting some of the lifting collisions of air molecules from the bottom of the wing. Ideally if the slope of the wing shape falls off faster than the air molecules are pushed into the void the air molecules miss the wing surface completely and do not counteract the lift, air molecules produce from the bottom of the wing, this condition is called the laminar flow in wind tunnel test and only happens at certain air speeds and attack angles for a particular air foil shape.

 Keep in mind that we always seem to view an airfoil backward with the air flowing over and under it, in reality the air is stationary and the wing moves through it disturbing it. All airfoils produce leading edge drag and since in physics you never get something for nothing the lift the wing produces converts to lift drag on the wing. The above formula predicts this drag as horse power per sec, and can be useful in test designing the best wing lift to power ratios of a wing configuration. Using and understanding these apparently unknown, new concepts of lift brings one to design some unique possibly never designed air foils to deal with low speed wings. Which have been done at H.G. Harding high school, Warren Ohio, with the help of their wind tunnel and students new and exciting high attack, high lift. anti- stale, low drag airfoils have been developed. Which use a clock wise air rotation over the wing instead of the stale causing counter clock wise air rotation found on all standard airfoils.

WARREN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS SOLVE AIR PLANE WING FLIGHT PROBLEMS

The problems with Bernoulli’s vacuum being applied to winged flight has been known for several years here in Warren, Ohio. Where for years Harding high school students ran win tunnel tests on different advanced air foils to be used in the construction of a Human powered helicopter. Under the supervision of George Lazar shop teacher and technical advisor Frank Naypaver Delphi Packard Electric, and president of Youngstown Warren Inventors Club. Students worked on designing a efficient high lift anti stall helicopter rotor that was discovered and developed, and is in use for the on going development of a human powered helicopter which now hangs from the ceiling of the Harding Highschool wood shop. We agree with Anderson that the accepted reasons for flight are wrong. We researched the “Coanda effect” and the Bernoulli theory but found them both to falls short of explaining all the varieties of flight like hot air balloons, bats, and insect flat wings. We found and developed a more acceptable theory, which is that of air mass displacement and we have developed a ”air mass displacement formula” that works well in calculating the possible lift of any wing or rotor using, usable wing area, angle of attack, and air speed. The air mass displacement idea demonstrates how helicopter rotors, airplane wings, and hot air balloons or lighter then air craft all share the same theory for flight .the Coanda and Bernoulli theories only try to explain air foil wings which they do very badly because using these theories no aircraft could fly upside down and bumble bees would have to learn to walk from flower to flower.

One of the wing designs that were tested and gave great promise for future helicopter rotors is the wedge wing rotor. When trying to design a the lowest drag rotor possible for a human powered helicopter some road blocks had to be by passed the main one was dynamic drag. When a regular type wing rotor rotates the lift speed increases the further away from the hub you get. If you have a good air foil it can only operate over part of the wing because close to the hub the air speed is to slow and at the ends of the rotor wing the air speed is to fast. The other problem with the rotor is that a attack angle of over twenty degrees the rotor wing will stall and lose lifting capability. This is one reason helicopters use so much fuel to fly. The problem for now is just some thing rotor designers have to live with. We did tests and came up with a new rotor design that shows promise in this design the wedge shaped rotor has a flat top that allows the air molecules on top of the wing to miss the wing altogether and produce no drag then rotate behind the wing collide on back of the wing and actually push the wing through the air. Then on the lower lifting surface of the rotor wing the air molecules collide at a forty five degree angle to give the best lift. This type of anti stall rotor can give thousands of pounds of lift with relativity little power because the power goes into the moving of air mass downward and not into over coming air drag. Normal wings stall at attack angles of more then fifteen to twenty degrees the reason for the stall is that the air molecules pass over the top of the wing and rotate around back into the wing colliding into the wing when this happens the collisions on top counter act the lifting collisions on the bottom of the wing, and the wing loses lift capability. With the wedge wing this does not happen because none of the air molecules touch the top of the wing to counter act the lifting air from the bottom. The other positive attribute of the wedge wing is that in wind tunnel tests the wing drag built up to a point then stopped while the lift kept going as the air speed increased.