AT single person airplane

Last crawled date: 2 years, 10 months ago

3D model of the AT single person aircraft. As the name implies, the aircraft is intented for the transportation of a single person. The wing profile used is the NACA 43012. Ailerons, rudder and eleavtor are controlled using wires. No flaps are present. The control is done manually using a control yoke and a lever to regulate the speed. Sensors are present to feed additional information to the pilot, however the airplane is not able to fly itself (no autopilot function). In the current model, no levers are present to regulate air/fuel mixture (depending on altitude). Wheel brakes are not foreseen, so taxying is impossible, the airplane needs to be pushed manually. The motor used is a Beta-type Stirling motor. It is heated by a burner running on a second-generation alcohol (for starting) and later-on on N20 (once the motor is hot enough). The motor is cooled by means of air. Heating and cooling is done independantly for (almost) each individual cylinder (3 valves for 4 cylinders). The valves (green objects in the model) are opened/closed by a PCB. The PCB opens and closes the valves by attaining information of a sensor that records the position of the bottom piston (power piston) of the first cylinder. Using this information, the system also immediatelly knows the position of the pistons of the other cylinders and knows which valves to close/open. The pilot has a lever to change from ethanol (or another alcohol, ie methanol or biobutanol) to N20, he can do so once he sees the motor temperature is high enough. In this model, no sparkplugs are foreseen, so the motor needs to be started by manually placing a flame near the fuel mouths. A next version could have sparkplugs fitted, and the motor on/off slider (present in this model) is then usable to engage/disengage the sparkplugs. A very light flywheel is present, used to make the engine run even a bit smoother. A basket clutch is also present, to allow to stop transferring power to the propellers while the engine is still on, this is useful to prevent the motor of turning the propellers untill it has reached full power (full power is necessairy for the airplane to be capable of taking off from a runway). The clutch is operated by a slider by the pilot, this is possible due to the use of a solenoid. A gearbox is also present in the model (brown box); this part is optional and if mounted, should be electrically operated. This allows the systems itself to select the appropriate gear, rather than having the pilot to need to select it. The power of the motor is then relayed to both propellers (both propellers always rotate at a same speed).