hey guys how you doing Mike Aubrey I'm

the host of the WC UAV challenge webinar series and so with us all right the lady
in charge princess Alya the coordinator the challenge Prince Leo thanks for being
here and we have our guest today mark page mark thank you for being with

us today so for those of you guys who were our airplane enthusiasts mark actually
was when the co-inventors of the blended wing aircraft is 18 years experience he
was working for McDonnell Douglas and Boeing when he did that but

now he's the VP and chief scientist of his own company and I'll let him give his
own introduction but he's going to be sharing with us some of his experiences
actually in that in that space and I'm super excited to be to be

on this webinar learning with you guys were gone some work thank you so much
for being here with us today um yeah Thank tell us a little more about your siding
yeah so that's right I was 18 years of McDonnell Douglas Boeing did

the blending body did props and stuff and all kinds of advanced airplane things and
then got the racing bug went a little bit insane to be honest and rook for Dan
Gurney's All American racers doing a champion or 850

horsepower open-wheel race cars go on 250 miles an hour insane stuff did that for
three years and then 12 years at Swift engineering doing much the same but with
NASCAR edweth with funny cars and all kinds of race cars and super

cars but also did created a blended wing series of UAVs while at Swift the killer
being bat we'll talk about those also did the concept jet which was a piece of
paper to first flight in 200 days very exciting program and now we're doing

those same sorts of things in my own company Wow so with that I'll go ahead and
get started I guess this is gonna be fun all right so we're going to talk about how
what makes blended wings suitable for uavs I want to acknowledge
first NASA Langley Boeing Swift Northrop and Raytheon who all contributed to the
advancement of either blended wing technology by itself oh or the use of that
technology for uavs and everything you're going to see is of

course unclassified unrestricted virtually all of its in the public domain already so
that our team over here at design and we're in Irvine California grow a small but
growing company about 40 folks these are the

vehicles that we've designed and and when I say we designed them we designed
them laughs that's so it's both a blessing and a curse you get to do cool stuff but
it's all on you and you show up on race day and you can't be late so

those skill sets naturally served as well doing advanced airplane projects so what
we do at the design is we do concept development all the way through low-rate
initial production we've got guys go out and play in the desert and

do flight testing that's a hoot and then we actually operate these systems
ourselves but we also have a big emphasis on styling and ergonomics strangely
enough for a technical company not surprisingly people seem to like

pretty things so do it doing stuff that's pleasing both when you approach it as a
product and look just simply look at it is a in our mind as a way to get things sold
and keep them sold so I'm going to go way back in time here

this is 1988 and the chief scientist at NASA Dennis Bushnell asked this question hey
could there be an aerodynamic Renaissance for the long haul transport here's why I
asked that question 1903 the Wright brothers create the airplane

a mere 44 years later we've got pressurized Toobin wing airplanes with swept wings
going near Mach 1 jet engines all the things we think of today is modern 45 years
later there's the a330 and there were many advances but

all these advances were small evolutionary increments and the pattern of the
vehicle hadn't changed in all that so we were charged by NASA to take a look at
some alternatives and we had
some notions on blending that we thought would be suitable to make a new
species of airplane that could help so what I'm showing you here is if I got back
then NASA asked us to come up with a 7000 nautical mile 800 passenger transport
if

I put 800 people in the normal volume they have in an airplane and put them in a
giant sphere that's what it looks like down the lower left a 7,000 square foot is the
surface area of a sphere that would hold everybody perhaps not

comfortably but would hold all the people to do what you normally do in an airplane
obviously that's not going to go near marks one that's not going to go eighty
percent of the speed of sound plan through the air so we all know the

upper guy the streamlined options were all familiar with the cigar that works great
its slender it's very low drag and more importantly when I pressurize it it's like a
balloon may I inflate it and now all the tension all the structural

loads are principally tension and most metallics are great in tension even carbon
composites are great in tension compression shear and bending is when things get
into trouble so down below however I could also wrap that same

volume with inner frisbee and remarkably the surface area is almost the same it's
a little bit better but basically the same the issue of course is for trans pressure for
transports if I want to pressurize if this isn't a favorable

shape I'll have to have bulkheads to resist turning that thing back into a spirit when
I pressurize it but you can see that if I change the concept for the fuselage I can
realize a small reduction in surface area why do I care about

surface area that's friction drag and every square foot of surface area is structure I
build typically surface area of an airplane weighs believe it or not between two and
three pounds per square foot that's a lot so we've got to find

ways to reduce that and of course the friction drag but here's where the magic
happens if i take a wing same wing for both airplanes juven wing airplane in a
blended wing airplane and I and I made it with the fuselage I get little magic
the fuselage on the tube and wing conceals part of the wing the wings lift believe it
or not is carried over on the fuselage pretty effectively so the fuselage doesn't kill
the lift that much and the fuselage hides a little bit of

the wing so some of the wing lift i get almost for free but when i have a blended
wing frisbee down below i hide a huge amount of the exposed wing it's just that
simple that is basically all there is to blended wings is that I'm

taking that that that cigar and I'm going to squish it preserving volume into a
shape that reduces the total surface area of the system together so now I've got a
twenty percent reduction in friction it when I integrate the

engines I get similar benefits when you integrate the tail planes I get even more so
now I've got a third less surface area on the airplane because this airplane doesn't
need a very large tail group because the inertias are much

smaller in pitch and yaw and the the variability in load nose-to-tail with that long
fuselage is significant so I need a big powerful tail to balance the different Center
gravity's I can do that very easily with control surfaces on the

wing for the blended wing so that's the essence of it let's look a little bit more into
what that means structurally for the airplane so on the upper left we're shown a
cross-section through the airplane where I've got the weight of

the airplane in red pulling the airplane down and I got the lift on the wings holding
the airplane up and if I imagine if i had a red arrow pointing down with a blue
arrow pointing up that was equal everywhere across the span there would

be no bending in the structure and no share in other words a structure I don't need
structure if the applied load in lift and the inertial reaction are perfectly equal
there's no stress in the structure

of course that isn't reality we get something and because I have the mass
concentrated in the middle I get very large shears and bending moments in that
wing structure right at the side of body look to the right you can see a blended
wing has an advantage which is that it distributes that payload more consistently
with the lift that carries it so now as I move from wingtip to wingtip and ask how
much shear and bending-moment is in the structure it's

quite dramatically reduced another way of looking at it down below is you look at
the tube and wing and look at the mass that the airplane must bear in red if you
and it's loads lengthwise and I've got the lift being born spanwise so

the structural load path is very long some a unit of lift and the wingtip going to lift
part of the weight in the tail you can see that load path is very long that integrates
up into a lot of structural weight blended wing they're

just more aligned aerodynamically this is where you get some really cool magic
when you're talking about it a transonic airplane so some of you so this is a little bit
of egg head stuck for the arrow guys so I apologize but let's just

say this if I want to go near the speed of sound like all of our airplanes but I'm in a
747 I'm going like point eight-five mock 85% the speed of sound well any old airfoil
on a wing just can't do that or stated differently if I

want to fly that fast I have to limit how much lips I carry or I have to limit how thick
the airfoil is because that thickness causes the air to accelerate so I have to give up
I can't have thickness and high lift I have to I have

to distribute them between those two demands so in this case when I look at a
blended wing and tell miss you guys can you see my cursor okay champ yes so
here is the lift distribution on the airfoil where did that come from well here's the

lift on the whole airplane some of you may know that optimum lift on an airplane
should be shaped like an ellipse that's true if there's no structure included what I
include structure it shouldn't be an

ellipse it should be slightly pointed ellipse it's a little bit like half way between a
triangle and an ellipse so this is an optimal arrow structural shape for the lift on
the airplane but you can see that out here the cord the
length between the leading and trailing edges of the airfoil is very small compared
to in here so the pressure loading how much lift i'm carrying per square foot is
much higher on the outer wing that's this yellow line then the

pressure loading in the middle where there's all this cord okay but the cool thing is
that because i have so much less pressure loading here i don't need it and i don't
want it I don't want to carry extra lift on the center body but

I don't want because it's not an ellipse shape it'll make more vortex dragon-like
more tornadoes drag if you will so I've got two things that make drag on an
airplane half my drag is vortex drag it has to do with how close this shape is

to an ellipse half the drag is friction drag that's just the wetted area the upper area
and the lower area added up that's friction area so when I get to have such a low
lift level lift pressure coefficient if you will in the middle

that allows me to go thicker well guess what that's what I'm putting payload I want
to be thicker so you get this really nice arrow structural optimum where the large
cord allows me to have the lift and that's cool because I want

large cords i want tall people and cargo in there and i can have both of them
structurally the airplane is very different the outer wing looks like any other jetliner
but if I go into the center here where the fuselages and

pressure vessels I have to cut the airplane into bays and I have to have these
members here to take the pressure loads and you can see here is a slice of half the
fuselage so there's the centerline of the fuselage that's the

nose the wings been cut off and if I pressurize it right it's going to pillow so we have
to size the structure so that pill owing is minor is small and I have to pay a price
port I don't get it for free okay it does cut it is heavier then

a tube and wing cylindrical fuselage in here but as a wing it's wildly less heavy than
the wing of a 747 in here because it's so deep in thick the skins dresses are very
low we tested it back in 97 at the National transonic facility
for a high Mach number and we had we were very thrilled to see that our
predictions in in in blue and the actual measured drag in red were so close and by
the way the test showed a little less drag we have got stellar lift-to-drag

ratio that's the aerodynamic efficiency we also test at low speed to make sure that
the airplane behaved properly and you can see here we also had good good
correlation between our tests and our predictions and we embarked then on

designing a jetliner this is what we called the so-called second-generation BWB this
is our big initial NASA contract and if you're going to be honest you've always got
to compare yourself to what the best conventional

could do yeah it's not good to just draw an airplane and think it's better and argue
that it's better you have to prove that it's better with a fair comparison so we had a
team of guys using the same tools but separate team developed the

airplane here it had an all flying vertical tail it had relaxed that of stability it's an all
carbon airplane it was a double-decker had some benefits there and we did the best
Toobin wing we could and then asked ourselves how did

the to compare on the same mission this by the way is what the interior looked like
you can see that basically it's a bunch of little it's like half 737s in length so that
center aisle there by the way on this airplane this is an eight

hundred passenger airplane it's not one that boeing would ever have built the
biggest one they would have offered would have been about 500 but in any case
NASA wanted a big airplane but nonetheless you can see that these bays

are sort of like a 737 or 757 fuselage only differences you've ever been in a 757
you know it takes an head takes forever to get off the thing because it's so darn
long each of these days is about a third as long as the 757 day

peace alaj so you get out to the front doors right away you have multiple ways of
exiting the airplane so even in an emergency the blend of wing it has a stellar
emergency egress speed compared to a tube and wing so it might at first
seem like oh wait a minute isn't that harder it's actually much much better because
I've got short cabins I have a common cross aisles and then I can I then one person
can't stop an entire tube of airplane one person can only

stop now of a small fraction of the airplanes capacity from getting out ok so when
all the dust settled here's where we were back in the early 90s looking at the
serpent 7,000 nautical miles was about an eight hundred

thousand pound airplane big wingspan because it likes that it's got that Center
body in there and the wing structure out for didn't stress very hard because it's it's
it's it's structurally very short the wing goes

out and says I want to optimize a little more span the bottom line is we had about
fifteen percent less takeoff weight twenty percent more arrow efficiency lift-to-drag
about twenty-seven percent less fuel burn and

so on and bear in mind with these numbers that this is actually a stunning in
reduction in structural weight which I don't show here but this it's about forty
percent less structural weight so that plus the fuel savings of course you

have fixed weights with all the seats and all the people those things are still there
so you can never you know you can't make those go away but but there was a
dramatic reduction in structural weight because it had so much

less surface area and the loads were so small this then is where the airplane
evolved to next this is an airplane that was being developed just before the
Boeing merger with McDonnell Douglas this is going to be the airplane that

saved McDonnell Douglas there were merger talks at the time with northrop and
that didn't materialize and much to all of our surprises we suddenly became Boeing
but just before that this is where where we were headed in California

with the Douglas Aircraft division and this airplane had passengers the top deck and
cargo on the bottom deck and it was really nice it packaged better and and its
operational characteristics for more like a normal
airliner here's a comparison of that airplane with an a380 and you can see how
different it is it's actually painting when you look at it by the way look at the
vertical tail on the a380 look at that monster all the weight and

friction drag of that thing why because the engines are a mile from the center line
and if one fails I got trouble right here's the floor plan here's the upper deck of a
584 passenger version of the airplane and you can see the two

decks of the Airbus a380 again on a big double decker I have to have very long
inflatable escape chutes there is challenging to keep those from blowing over in the
wind and so forth so having all the passengers on on the deck bear

near the ground is really nice for safety and operations this is what the airplane
looked like just before the Boeing merger when it was being proposed as
something that could go in and be a competitor with the Airbus a380s at the

time and you can see the numbers again the empty weight of the airplane almost
twenty percent less takeoff weight eighteen percent less you need a one less engine
you don't need you need three and set of four and I got thirty

<font color="#CCCCCC">two percent less fuel burn per seat so big big savings a
lot of people ask the question hey if I have a blended wing while on normal tube
and wing airplane they're cool because I want to make a bigger airplane aight i just
cut the

nose off cut the tail off put a constant section extension in and i stretched the
airplane easy-peasy and we're not going to do that option airplane like this it's an
airfoil if i cut it from the left side to the right side and try to

stick something in between it's very hard to make death smooth what we realized
and this this is this is my principle patent on the blood wing actually was that if
instead you plug on the center line so you go air the

airplane from the center line out you add wingspan wing area and floor area all at
once and oh by the way it's balanced the payload center gravity and the lift that
the additional lift are already aligned you get a
 really nice family and you can have the outer wing largely untouched as you grow
the airplane in this case is showing from 350 passengers to 550 that's what it looks
like so you can see kind of conventional structure outboard wings

ribs and spars inboard I got these big open vases very large ribs this airplane was a
3 engine pod mounted so it's very different than a flying wing it blends the payload
and wing it has you can look at it a couple different ways it's like

a flying wing with a very unusual cord in the middle a friend of mine says hey isn't
a blender wing just a flying wing with to taper ratios and you sort of right it sort of
is but the point is that the how you get to that blending

and what you do with it that's that's the thing is optimizing the arrow structural
solution very little part count that's the thing that excites the guys who want to
build these things so again thirty percent less airframe wait

<font color="#CCCCCC">twenty-five percent less thrust more error efficiency less

pilgrim then and an endurance it's crazy can get a lot more endurance so for a UAV
why do I think these are good good options well for the same reasons we just listed

light low-cost but we also get an unusual payload volume it's flat the payload
compartment instead of a tube and wing it splat right maintainable it's sort of like
take the lid off and lay it on my table looks like i was you

know got my radio shack kit of stuff parts on it is laid it out flat very maintainable as
Christ survivable because it's it's tough it doesn't have skinny little tiny things
sticking out up sprouting all over the place the

packing volume when I look at how much volume is in the airplane compared to the
sceptre volume of the airplane on a tarmac it's very very efficient as well that said I
will say this when you look at the pack out of a UAV a tube and wing

UAV you take the wings filet them against the fuselage it packs down to a pretty
small box glenda wings don't pack down that small they pack down from a volume
standpoint very nicely but they usually have a little
bit of a triangle shape so that's one area where the blender wing isn't as as good as
a tube and wing for uavs so when we started the UAV looking at it as an option for
a blended wing we had kind of interesting notion we said let's see if

we can make this you know so flat can we make the airplane at three pieces
because we were thinking of making many many many many many little airplanes
and this is the three-piece airplane concept we came up with an upper skin a lower

skin and a payload cover now the lower skin you got a what you're looking at there
is it's sort of like a like a tray at a cafeteria it's got dents and divots to hold the you
know the beans and the hot dog would keep them all separate

when I glue those together it traps the volume in the middle it only eats up about a
third of the payload volume so there's a that's that the house shape in the middle is
offset from the upper Skinner and I glue it all together traps

the volume that's a fuel tank then everything else is accessible all the systems and
engine so forth under that belly pan that kind of depicts it so when i boot it all
together I didn't have a separate fuel tank that I made it

was just a bump in one of the skins I didn't have separate compartments had to
make separately a they're just depressions that departs for me and there it is and
we built that dang inter plane maybe wind tunnel tested it and it

was it flew great and that's about the time we got the attention of Northrop
Grumman who said hmm this is pretty interesting let's collaborate with you guys
and we started the development of an even more advanced airplane it was

bigger that would meet the needs of other users who had to carry more payload
this shows some of the flow solutions on on the airplane and some of you who
aren't familiar with fluid dynamics or computational fluid dynamics

which are looking at of the pressures on the airplane red is vacuum it's something
less than the atmospheric pressure blue is compression it's it so it's higher than
atmospheric pressure Green is zero pressure it's basically
atmospheric and you can see that the trick to the airplane why it doesn't need a
tail is because I push down on the back of the fuselage that's what's trimming there
and that's what's holding the nose up on my stable airplane and

allowing me to have a nice span load shape this is the kv-4 that we tested in the
wind tunnel at Swift again we got great data and confirmation that the lift drag
performance was there so some of you might be asking why the heck to

the winglets aim down I don't think I'm going to tell you yet i'll take a weight save
that to the head there's a really good reason we'll talk about that you guys it's
what you guys want to ask me I'll tell you so in flight test one of

the things we were very proud of in the development to that airplane well as we
wanted this thing to be usable for people who didn't have a lot of resources and
didn't want to have to have a lot of resources to operate it

this is a big airplane you know relatively speaking it's a couple hundred pounds and
is carrying sizable pale and it flies for fifteen hours that's a pretty serious airplane
but we were able to pack it down three

airplanes fit into those boxes you see on that trailer and the entire net system you
see down below hangs on the side of that trailer so one trailer carries all three
airplanes spares fuel and the launch recovery system so one

trailer is the whole system with that airplane so this is a going to give you an
image of why I think blended wings are especially interesting for uavs so you're
looking at the center body that we have been taken off the airplane you

can see the props in the back says pusher airplane this is the airplane we
developed up as Swift alone at the time actually and then we merged again with
northrop and then they adopted it as their baseline class two UAV so if i

take the payload cover off and i look inside there's in this case i've got a fuel tank
in the middle it could be left and right they wanted to have turn to separate turrets
one on left one on the Rights they wanted the fuel in
the middle instead of on the side and then in front of that fuel tank into the other
side is room for all the other paddlers you want to carry you can see the engine in
the back take the skin off further you can see the engine and

muffler accommodations and these airplanes need good muffling to be good

neighbors not too noisy so you in the what we call the arrowhead the pointy bit in
the back of the Air Force plenty of room for nice mufflers you can also

see in the nose we have the vehicle management system where the autopilot
power management systems live the out of the GPS equipment you can see the
two turrets are the circular things there with the quick disconnects and then

we've got the operator interface panel on the lower right so when I'm setting up
the airplane get ready to fly it tells the operator what the voltages and the
batteries and on the bus and what's the reps are and so forth here again to

look from the back side take the skin off you can see what it looks like so it's a very
different architecture than a normal tube and wing airplane that allows you some
very different opportunities and there's a and a lot of

useful volume in the airplane so I want to show you a video produced by Northrop
Grumman that depicts the first flight of the bat 12 this is up at Camp Roberts and
this is showing that their customer wanted to have a standard launcher that

was used by the other services and so our beautiful little lightweight launcher was
replaced by 14 times as heavy but it was approved for use overseas so there you
go so here's the airplane this airplane had enlarged wing

tips to house special antennas and this is showing us the different software that
Northrop had to identify things and for this some of the things that we're trying to
do with the wildlife challenge of course is to be able to see things

that are moving and quickly identify them more quickly than you would just look
at a stream so there are all kinds of neat software algorithms are going to play a
big role in the UAV challenge we
hope all the competitors really emphasize that because there's going to be goals in
them thar hills getting the airplane there that's important but extracting the data is
the most important thing so the other thing the

airplane has here so you can see for example Kestrel motion detection so it sticks
out anything it sees moving and a little shadow coming from behind a tree or shrub
line or something just popped right out at you when you have that kind

of software available this airplane is net recovered so it's a run so-called runway
independent airplane it's interesting some of you may know the in situ scan legal
family of airplanes and they have a really nice recovery system

called skyhook which is very very nice and and we had a similar system for the
airplane unfortunately that the patent at the time and they were not willing to
license that technology so we went instead with a straightforward net

system but that ended up having a lot of benefits it treats the payloads a lot nicer
than than some of the other recovery systems so that's an example of the of the
airplane being realized as a UAV and to wrap up here let me just show

you I just want to show you some pictures of the of the x-48 so some of you are
aware that NASA and Boeing so this is after i left boeing by the way in the 12th or
so years that i had left boeing there i had the pleasure of

designing about 10 vehicles all of which either racing competition or flu and used
by our services overseas and so forth 10 anos goodness vehicles and that's the real
privilege and amazing and and it's just tough for big

companies to move fast it took it in that same time period after i left they finally
got this thing flying so there's the x-48 wonderful program they've learned a ton but
it was a time-consuming program I here it is at

the Langley 30 x 60 wind tunnel which no longer exists so that wind tunnel is now
gone been leveled this airplane was to demonstrate the low speed handling
qualities of a commercial jet transport
class airplane there it is flying at the edwards air force base in the three engines
sort of standard version and then later they did an x 48 c version where they
looked at using n plate fins to act as acoustic shields to get even

more acoustics benefits from the airplane there it is again flying over Edwards Air
Force Base so here's our contact information if anybody has questions we'd love to
love the chat with you contact us anytime and with

that I think I'm available for questions guys that wasn't doing some questions
Victor as impressive that was really yeah thank you very much and actually we do
have somebody from now on mark moore who actually did a webinar for us

previously on the vbox war I know mark oh wow well we should unmute mark so
he can ask some questions too and you could say hello great let's see yeah where's
my hey mark my lord uh yeah mark are you there I'm here hey Mark more there
hey I

mark more how are you anyway other questions then we have a question about
distant what what are you using the fasten those different pieces in your UAV
together Demi best practice is to advise there certainly so that's a great

question actually because it's Ronald is overlooked we almost always use quarter
turn fasteners very common in aerospace and what that means is I can unscrew
something by turning my screwdriver one quarter turn and I can lock it down by

going one quarter turn there are little expensive parts compared to a screw but
their captive which means that when i unscrew it there's no way I can lose the
screw is captive it stays with the part so

when you make something you want to use in the field especially if you're going to
be going in and out of a part of the airplane a lot always use captive fasteners
quarter-turn fasteners there's all kinds of captive fasteners you can

google them up and you'll see all the different ideas but the point is you're out in
the middle of nowhere and you gotta screw ever and you drop a screw in the sand
or the dirt now what the other thing you want to think about when we
 design our UAVs we try to make all of the non captive fasteners exactly the same
fastener so inside where we have normal screws and normal bolts and whatnot we
use the same fastener for all mounting and that helps the operators

quite a bit ok so in quarter turn and then uniform be uniform in the ones you use
standardized mm-hmm okay do you throw back up your contact info mm-hmm
then we got a question asking by the materials that you're using what are the

materials of construction so most of our UAVs have been built the bats and the
killer bees are built out of carbon we normally use a bidirectional cloth prepreg and
you can autoclave curatorial clave systems and that's a really good

way to go autoclaving is expensive autoclaving applies more pressure and it does

make the system higher performance but it is costly so out of autoclave is where
the industry is headed and there are many good epoque sees now so you

just you stack up your layers of cloth you put a piece of plastic over the top of the
vacuum hose yeah suck it down so you got one atmosphere of consolidation
pressure cook it in a simple oven no pressure yeah so so instead of doing it

the Kentucky Fried Chicken way just do it like you at home you put it in another
and and then the then the epoxy kicks off it converts it state all the broken chains
linked up the end link up and lock it up and that's what the

curing is and I've got a solid part fiberglass is much less expensive not as strong
not as stiff but the nice thing about fiberglass especially if you get a glass not s-
class s glasses structural paragraph e glass is electronic

fiberglass eat glass is almost as strong a structural fiberglass but it's

electromagnetically transparent so your antennas will work if you make your
airplane have a carbon got to be real careful where the antennas are so all of

our UAVs had a glass wing nuts where the antennas lived so the antennas were all
inside a electromagnetically transparent material which is e glass our last webinar
was on rfid tags so that's actually a very timely statement you
made I have a question oh I know what the design that you did included a fuel tank
but now if we were looking at using batteries what kind of guess endurance are we
looking at and what are we taking away from the weight of that and I guess

it would depend on how much you would use but can you kind of talk about the
comparison between the two three sure sure so batteries are batteries are
improving so fast but but of course they're really still not there to

compete with the gasoline or diesel fuel Cara scenes and whatnot it was still off
by a factor of ten or so so you're not going to get day long endurance with
batteries with anything close to the payload weight that we carry today so if

we had two airplanes of equal size one with batteries and one with gas the payload
difference and you tried to match the endurance of course at some point the
batteries will never get there but let's say you do a day long

endurance it's very tough with batteries you would have it very my new to pay load
fraction that's why you just don't see them used for high endurance that said it's
crack on a couple hours which is very useful

very useful it can be done and you can have a useful payload fraction so when I
say payload fraction I mean how much payload weight do you have is a fraction of
the total weight and you know fifteen percent payload fraction is pretty

common for a long endurance airplane because you got a lot of fuel with batteries
it might be tough to get fifteen percent and have good endurance but so you've got
a couple issues one is for the types of things we're trying to

do here we don't want to use what are called primary cells so there's a type of
battery that's awesome called the primary cell and it's a single-use cell so you can
get lithium ion like or lithium based batteries that are primary

batteries and they'll have twice the performance of bat rechargeables but as a
practical matter I don't think that is a good solution for this competition or this
type of mission because you won't use these over and over and over and
<font color="#CCCCCC">over again that be very costly so my hope I think fuel
cells when they come aboard that'll be the end of the internal combustion engine
when you really get fuel cells light enough and that can eat almost anything and
there

are fuel cells that can eat gasoline and other types of fuels and make electricity
that's going to be fantastic the reason is not just because I get the energy density of
gasoline again but one problem with batteries we don't talk

about much is it the batteries i launched with are the batteries i'll and with on a
747 it takes off with a bunch of gas and lands at about half its takeoff weight so it's
average weight over the mission is way less than a

takeoff weight so I on gasoline systems and other you know carbon fuel systems as I
use the energy I throw the weight overboard on batteries i use the energy and i
keep lugging that that good for nothing you know no good discharged

battery is still on my airplane oh so you're stuck with that and is some of you who
are familiar with the breguet range equation from school there's a breguet benefit
to consumable fuels that you don't get with batteries

but some of you might get clever say hmm but maybe I could do something
different why can't they drop some why can't that throw some of that weight
overboard so give that a little pop I don't know if we wanna have a kid people just
chuck in

their batteries mid-flight in a reusable recyclable and way yeah me and Mars have
that discussion yeah that's right well there are some possibilities on it depends on
the mission yeah you could put again parachute a tracker on it i

guess but yeah you got that digit good point i haven't actually i hadn't made that
connection but it's it seems so obvious as you're mentioning it lee yeah it does
affect things why not a quite back battery yeah can we ask you a

theoretical question just a definition of drag there's a question that should that
Ron asked a little while ago I'm asking about induced drag you're talking about
vortex drag meet you can talk about something like could you define
induced drag for us absolutely so so I mentioned a bit ago that airplane this is a
very classical result for when you look at airplanes when they're flying at their point
of Maxim see that's when their lift / their drag is maximized at

that condition it's half of your drag is what we call parasite drag which was mainly
friction drag and half of your drag is induced drag we call it induced drive because
it's lift induced drag and here's the problem with lift lift leaves

vortices in the wake so when I make lift I deflect the air and when I do so I i leave
energy in the air due to deflecting it that's lift induced drag and the evidence of
that is the vortices in the air so you've all seen airplanes

making landings sometimes you see kind of a white wispy tube coming off the
wingtip they're not dumping fuel that's the wingtip or text the high pressure air
under the wing is whipping around the wingtip to

<font color="#CCCCCC">the vacuum on top and it makes it spin it makes a little

tornado that is behind the airplane for miles actually last for miles and miles and
miles and the in that vortex years going very very fast in the middle the pressure
drops the

temperature drops and the water vapor condenses up into water droplets that
reflect light and so you see them and so that's a so there you actually see the
vortex drag all that energy that was left in the air came from somewhere well

guess what it came from you and your propeller you had them yet to make energy
to drag the airplane through the air and make that lift so reduce drag yeah is the
same as vortex drag in that terminology okay yeah there we go that's

the question there you go Ron they are analogous yet question from Raj for you will
the will the winglets act as a vertical stabilizer also or should actually of just
reading this question or should we stick with D control

services so so so on a blended wing because we sweep the wing for pitch stability
and control that places the wingtips after the center of gravity the airplane so it's a
great place to use to add winglets to double as bins so the
airplanes that I showed you today we do that so those wing those winglets on the
tip we just talked about vortex drag or induced stress winglets reduce that because
they make the airplane appear to have more span I should have mentioned

that before the thing that reduces friction drag or parasite drag is small wetted
area surface area the thing that reduces vortex drag is big wingspan which is why
gliders have big wing spans that's why blend of wings are really

cool because they reduce the wetted area and now since the wing structure is so
much lighter I can stretch it out further and get more span the whole system just
feeds on itself I can get more lift drag ratio so I've taken a

bird walk I've lost the original question basically I ask you how do you yes how do
you stabilize it hurt a'kla I mean that's the one here there you go and it'll do a lip
so so winglets reduce

vortex drag and so that's a good thing so putting the winglets on okay yay yay
team now I can use them since the wing tips or after the center gravity that winglet
can act as a fin to provide read responsibility absolutely yes and that's

a great two for two for the price of one well I'll make it a three-fer and you
mentioned earlier there's a reason why your your UAV had the fins upside down I
mean it's Edison have anything to it I don't really ask what is the answer so

the answer is the ring the reason winglets reduce drag you can is all kinds of ways
you can explain it but here's one way to explain it I mentioned before that if I
don't have a winglet high pressure air on the bottom of the

wing comes whipping around the wingtip into the vacuum on top okay so if you
imagine above the wing there's an inflow and below the wing there's an outflow if I
stick a fin straight up it's just like a sail on a sailboat if I get an air

flow component to my side I can make thrust I can push forward just like a sailboat
does sailboats take wind from the left of the right and and they deflect it partially
aft and then they get thrust well winglets are also
sometimes called tip sales so the winglet literally is thrusting so if I were to cut the
wing lid off and bolt it back together with a force gauge in between I actually
measure a thrust on the wing tip now am I getting something

for nothing no I am NOT the total airplane still makes drag it just makes less
because the wing that is contributing in l a-- component of thrust well since it's
contributing thrust if i put the wing that below the

wing it also holds the nose up and for those of you who are airplane geeks you
know that for airplanes that are statically stable airplanes that are naturally stable
without a computer helping them in pitch they end up having

a nose down moment there's a torque that's it has to be balanced I normally

balance out with the tail on a blended wing i balance it with the apt part of the
center bar by pushing down a little there but if i

have the wingtips thrusting forward guess what that also pulls the nose up so i get
some free trim make sense it's very clever how'd you come up with that you just
tried it let's just know things see what it does so so I wanted to do it

<font color="#CCCCCC">for years that so it's funny how things go in the industry
you see winglets on all the airplanes out there in the world right but but winglets
work much better going down like do going up for one simple reason and that is
that on the

upper surface of the wing I've got that cruise the flow Moton many of your
listeners may not know this i'm flying around it maybe eighty percent of the speed
of sound but on top of the wing the flow is supersonic the wing way it

makes lift is by accelerating flow on top of the wing and decelerating the flow on
the bottom these letting the flow on the bottom makes high pressure accelerating
it on the top makes low pressure the difference lips doing up so

got supersonic flow and by golly goes supersonic and then it slows down through a
shockwave so you got super sonico and the shockwave on the wing the whole time
you're flying to grandpa's house so so all that supersonic flow on
top if i now take my wing supersonic flow on top and I bend the wing tip up to
make a winglet I'm getting supersonic flow superimposed on supersonic flow i get i
can get nasty action in the middle if i go this way then the super

velocities we call them don't add up so badly i get some relief so it's a much better
way to do it of course I then my wing let's hit the ground but I land in a crosswind
and I have in a half a wing I knocked the wingtips off that's the

only reason they go up on on jet liners is that otherwise that the natural directions
down anyway be down so because you're catching the thing that's how you're able
to get away with it right so if it is yeah so if we're gonna

have a design that we want to actually land we should stay away from that well
yeah so some of you guys should Google Google ewald Shuster SCH us ter blended
wing body jet or maybe it's killer bee jet kb jet and you'll see the landing

gear architecture right I designed for for ewald and he took our killer bee put a jet
engine in and it has the winglets are the landing gear the wheels and there's a
main wheel in the nose and you guys might say wait a

<font color="#CCCCCC">minute that's that's madness that's crazy this piece of

landing gear in the wingtip you're going to snap the wings off on landing and it's
and again one of those things it doesn't make sense at first but but the truth is
when you put

wheels in the wingless tips and put a big wheel in the middle the nose wheel is
actually the main gear which you really have our two very lightly loaded tail
wheels on the wing tips so when I land I've got the myth the nose gear if

you will the main gear in the nose is very near the center of gravity it bears most
the way to the airplane the wing tips are not carrying much load so even if they hit
first the airplane just pushes out of the way because it's not

it's not reacting any load at any inertial load so so that thing works great and
someday I want to make a general aviation airplane it does that other question the
guys let's give a second did you ask yeah all the
questions cuz it seems like sometimes I'll get these questions in sometimes we
won't oh let's see I don't think I missed any home but I here's a question about
Roger I'm sorry so the question is um and these mentioned drone flights can

VTOL be achieved I sorry I camera would beat all means oh sorry thank you sorry
guys it's easier just for me just to ask him Bluff so with are you eight so every time
one of our customers would wat go to a rid of control flying club and

watch some guy hang as airplane on the prop and just hover in front of him with a
normal airplane hanging on the prop they'd come back and ask why can't we do
that why can't we take off and land vertically

and of course the answer is you can put an engine big enough the rate of control
guys of course keep because their airplane is all engine it's not currently useful
load and and the engines colossally giant and burns fuel

like mad so so it turns out that if you wanted to do VTOL on the little skinny
propeller it's a disastrous idea actually by the way I don't want to be controversial
but a lot of the guys are probably thinking about quadrotors and

quadrotors are actually terribly inefficient unless those individual rotors are very
very very very large the quadrotors we all see today are impossibly small so all of
the efficiency so those of you who working

on quadrotors and getting the VTOL benefit which is wonderful VTOL it's fantastic
but then you have to pay for it when your enroute and in cruise and holding
yourself up the energetics are poor in fact are terrible so the only

way you can improve the energetics is to reduce the disk loading and there's some
classical relationships you can find on the internet that show how you know if I
have forty percent more prop diameter and I got doubled the disc area then the

power I need to drive that comes down dramatically maybe comes down thirty five
percent or something so so take a look and propellers are light you know make
them big the little ones are easy because they're cheap and they're
available but do the math and figure out how to do big props so VTOL on a blended
wing if you put a fan in the middle of the body terrible idea because you're taking all
the real estate that you just paid dearly for it to carry the good

stuff if you want to hang the airplane on the prop you can do it but again you end
up with an engine typically for VTOL the engines would have to be between five
and seven times bigger in both horsepower and wait to hang the airplane

on the prop with the useful payload so that's that's nasty when you think about
airplanes are typically also about fifteen percent of your weight is typically
propulsion the the motor itself not the batteries and fifteen

percent your payload well I'm going to take that fifteen percent that was
propulsion before multiply times five you can see I have I'm getting into trouble a
lot of weight so I'll question have you tried a bungee launching your

devices before have we had would you advise it but bungees are great just be
aware of this though is a little-known thing it turns out that the army originally
deployed the what was it called that was the it doesn't matter

the there was an electric UAV that was used for quite a few years where one person
held the airplane and it had a hook in the nose and it hooked to a bungee and
another guy stood about 12 feet away they stretched that bungee

upheld the bungee up in the air and they shot it right and believe it or not there
were actually very serious injuries from now I bet they leave awful injuries not like
you would never imagine could be possible injury so also

if you do a bungee do it like the do it like a high start google high start H I s ta RT
that's what the glider guys do the competitive glider guys doing basically it's a
stake in the ground with a rubber band you stretch it out

you let go of the airplane horizontally and yeah you needa longer rubber band but
it worked great all right mark this has been a lot of fun are you gonna come with us
to South Africa you should I were loving already I would love to you
need to come alright well all the best to your team members Bend and all the
listeners huh yeah thank you so much for taking the time to be yesterday and
everyone else that princess Leah you have any closing remarks all right

gentle stuff in the world of the challenge absolutely I do want to thank work again
for his great webinars and I think it was very very very helpful and I I think you
know teams might find it to be pretty useful if that is a route

that they're looking at getting involved in now can you see my screen or are we still
sharing mar you need to prevent change that real quick what about now yes you
can see my screen not a presenter be you yeah yeah

you're the presenter now hit play yes all right there we go all right for those of you
that don't know our critical design review is out with details june thirtieth is when
it's due so make sure you go to teens critical

design review and review this if you have any questions go ahead and email but
we're out all the details that you need for this tough challenge now there's one one
thing i do want to add a I double-a has their site at conference

January 2015 and they've they're allowing us to have anywhere from four to six of
our teams present in their engineering design papers so what we need to do is we
need to submit to them by June second I've working with them

and see if we get an extinct extension from them because i know our design
reviews are due on the 30th so hopefully we'll get that extension but if we don't
we'll need the teams that are interested in presenting at their conference to

actually send us the call for papers or the paper that you're interested in
submitting for this which is pretty much your design that you're doing for the
challenge and send it to us by the 30th of May and then what we'll have to do is

see if we get six papers from you guys great you know we're just going to go
ahead and forward those to them but if we get 10 or 20 or 30 we will have to
evaluate those internally and then pick the top six and submit them submit them
to AI EE but here's the details for what you would need for your paper so if you are
interested go ahead and go to this page and look at it and see what the
requirements are I am like if working on a deadline to see if we can

wait to submit ours until after our design our critical design reviews have been
submitted by the teams so if you guys can go ahead and check this out if you're
interested that would be great design reviews are available and other

than that next week I will be at the AUVSI conference and if you or your team
members or anybody from your organization is attending please make sure you
send me an email at director at wcu abc.com and that way I will schedule

some time to meet with you we are trying to work with some of the media to see if
we could do some interviews with any of our teams especially if it's a it's our local
Florida team that would be fantastic for you guys to actually meet

with our publicist in Florida and he'll work with you to promote the challenge but
also what your team is working on as well so that's the email send me an email if
you guys are planning to attend the auvsi conference I'll be there from

the 12th of May until the 15th so pretty much the entire conference um I think
that should be it for me unfortunately our South African director is not on today so
we won't be able to have our news on the ground but I know that he is

working hard in trying to get the information that we need for CAA approvals for
flight and everything because i know that's been a critical issue in South Africa so
keep in mind that we're working on that and for the

challenge it should mean should not be a problem for us to actually fly because we
are flying in private property but also working with one of the national parks to
see if we will need the extra space to fly with them any other

questions Toby had some comments but I think we can take them offline okay all
right well that's nice well thanks again mark for a great presentation appreciate it
all right guys well everyone have a
marvelous week and we'll see how the next one mark thank you again there was a
lot of fun and take our guys

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