That's a pretty broad question. What in particular are you wanting to know? What kind of power ratings, speed, static thrust, etc are you interested in?
I more or less need some general information now. Sort of a starting point. I need to design a lifting body to carry some camera equipment, for inspection of hard to reach areas. I want to use a UAV type vehicle, something that could possibly hover, for short trips, less than an hour, also to total weight would have to be less than 50 lbs to be portable and easily carried into location. Thanks for your reply and any assistance you can give me to get me pointed in the right direction.
I have actually played with an idea like this at one time and shelved it for a couple of years when I started working on my homebuilt.
My concept was actually designed to be an ultralight type aircraft with a max gros of about 500lbs. It was basically a flying wing (lifting body) with a vectorable ducted fan that was not designed to actually hover, but could possibly be hovered in a light to moderate headwind. (I called it accellerated hover.)
If you aren't looking for speed, a large diameter ducted fan (prop) is capable of producing a large amount of static thrust out of a relatively small engine and can be lighter than a rotorcraft because you don't usually need a reduction gearbox. The only problem is that the duct that helps you create all that static thrust is going to be very draggy at high speed.
It just depends on how fast you want it to go, how much takeoff room you have, and how badly you need it to hover. Hovering is the hardest part of vertical flight. If you can get away with a very short take-off and landing with the ability to hover in a headwind I can show you something interesting. Mike C.
I would be interested in seeing what you have. Hovering is an ideal I think I can get away with something slow moving, but may have to upgrade the video?
This aircraft could be made to hover, but it would take at least three on-board gyros, about another dozen servos, a megabuck multi-channel radio and you would probably have to hire an alien with six hands to fly it. I designed it to fly on a simple and cheap 4 channel radio as I have no real interest in R/C other than to test this thing and got one really cheap.
Contact me at micallahan@worldnet.att.net and I'll try to get you some rough drawings and digital pics of the 3'x4' 1:4 scale R/C model I built. I never flew the model, but I built a 12"x14" 1:12 glider with the duct and same basic geometry and it flew great. Mike C.
