Another Look at 1930's Cyclogyro Plane Design

trogador writes to mention that a group of researchers is taking another swing at the idea of a cyclogyro design for a UAV. Even though the cyclogyro design was invented in the 1930's there are no records of a successful flight. "Cyclogyros have the potential to be highly maneuverable flying robots due to their method of operation, making them potentially more suitable for complex tasks than helicopters and other micro air vehicles (MAVs) with less maneuverability. The biggest challenge in designing the cyclogyros is varying the angle of attack of the rotating wings. This ability would enable the plan to change altitude, hover, and fly in reverse. To achieve this quick angle variation, the researchers introduced an eccentric (rotational) point in addition to a rotational point connected to a motor."

Like a helicopter?

The biggest challenge in designing the cyclogyros is varying the angle of attack of the rotating wings.

Don't helicopters have to do this too? I think it is one of the things that makes helicopters tough to manufacture. This would be cool to build, even if it wasn't a great design, just because it looks wacky.

Re:Like a helicopter?

Yes, helicopters do it too. The advancing blade meets the air at aircraft velocity PLUS velocity due to the spinning of the blades. The retreating blade meets the air at rotational velocity Minus aircraft forward speed. Thus to produce the same lift, it has to have a higher angle of attack. This is done by the cyclic pitch control. Depending on the total lift needed the angle of attack has to be increased for all the blades by equal amount. That is called the total pitch. It does make the hub mechanism of the helicopter blades very complex.

This is all very nice

But will it cut my lawn? Without supervision? Can I set it to keep the neighbours dog out? Lasers? Can it have lasers? Lasers would be nice.

Re:This is all very nice

Lasers? Can it have lasers? Lasers would be nice.

You must be new here. Lasers go on SHARKS. Robots with lasers are SO 1980s.

Goldberg to the Rescue...

Interesting concept. I'm wondering if they can get past the weight that the machine's complexity will add. And there's also the safety aspects when something this complicated breaks down in mid-air. Course, who cares about a robot, but this thing will never get man-rated.

Re:Goldberg to the Rescue...

Yeah, as I recall, one of the drawbacks of this design is that it can't glide like a plane or autorotate like a helicopter. If it loses power, it's coming DOWN. For a UAV that's not a big problem, I suppose.. though I wouldn't want to be underneath it.

For that matter, a large-scale model would be a little scary to be around during takeoff and landing. I've done hover loads on a Huey (climbing in while it's hovering about 3 feet off the ground) and it still feels like the rotor's about to take your head off. Not to mention how it blows dust and gravel everywhere. This thing would be like a whirling death machine.

Still, for a small, agile robotic observation platform, I can see where it'd be useful. But with several decades of experience with helicopters behind us, I doubt it's going to happen unless there are some VERY compelling performance differences.

Can Cyclogyros Autorotate?

Can Cyclogyros autorotate [wikipedia.org] like helicopters? I suspect that they can. I have seen plans for model "airplanes" that are spinning cylinders of airfoils. This would make them a lot safer. (Or give an option for a safe recovery mode of a robot in case of engine failure.)

Lots of Google Entries [google.com] but no Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Same fuel consumption as helicopters

In a fixed wing aircraft the engines develop enough thrust to overcome the drag. Typical Lift to drag ratio is between 10 and 12 for commercial jets. Some sail planes and gliders have achieved L/D ratio of 30 and 40. In any hovering aircraft, be it helicopter or vectored thrust machines like the Harrier, or the stupid plane V22, the engines must develop enough thrust to overcome the weight. (Weight = Lift). Thus they develop between 10 and 12 time more thrust and thus they consume that much more fuel. That can not be avoided.

Changing the angle of attack of each foil in the wing for this aircraft is no doubt complex, but even helicopters have this quite complex cyclic pitch/total pitch changing mechanisms. Given the advancement in materials and electrical actuators, it is possible that the time has come for a horizontal axis rotating wing aircraft.

May be this craft will transition from hover to flight with locked wings more easily and more stably than that boondongle from Fort Worth, V22 Osprey. Thus for the long haul you get the speed and efficiency of the fixed wing aircraft. But you get hover ability too. The price you pay is to haul a larger powerplant all the while. But still it might beat V22.

Re:Same fuel consumption as helicopters

Commercial jets are at lift/drag of around 18-20 now
As an engineer working with fixed wings it is my firm belief that helicopters fly because they are so ugly that the ground repels them - on that basis this thing is getting to the moon.

Seeing as the link to TFA is dead ...

... here's a link to another page describing Cyclogyros and how they (should) work.
Best of all, it has pictures! ;)

Re:Seeing as the link to TFA is dead ...

Dammit, posting the actual link would have helped here. Anyways, for the rebound:

http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/cyclogyro/cyclogyro.htm [pipex.com]

Slashdotted?

The page linked in the summary is generating a 403 error.

The front page of the main website seems ok.

The page is returning an error, and this:-
"This Website Is Powered by Doteasy.com $0 Web Hosting"

I guess you get what you pay for.

A different link with Video!

http://serve.me.nus.edu.sg/cyclocopter/ [nus.edu.sg]

Link slashdotted, so I googled around and...

Apparently, Chinese and Japanese are way ahead... Working prototypes and all that...

http://www.youtube.com/user/huyu0711 [youtube.com]

http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200523/000020052305A0951847.php [sciencelinks.jp]

Figures.
It was always obvious that robotic overlords will NOT be speaking English as first language.

Well... At least we can eliminate a few more of "in charge of Gundam potentials".

How does it land?

just wondering

strange Design

the design looks like it would produce as much down presure as it would lift unless there were a way of inverting the scoop of the wing so on the down swing it could also still provide lift.

Flying through its own downwash = bad.

So one of the reasons they try to keep airplanes separated in the sky is because of the downward flow of air they generate behind them. For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction: if the air is lifting the plane, the plane must push the air down. If one plane flies too close to another, the downwash can cause the trailing plane to crash.

The wings of this thing generate a downwash at the top of the "paddle wheel" which flows down and strikes the wing at the bottom of the paddle wheel. Not one website discussing these planes mentions this. Maintaining control and lift in this situation sounds ... challenging.

The 4:30 Autogyro

Burns: Yes, I'd like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam by aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro?
Squeaky Voiced Teen: Uh, I better look in the manual.
Burns: Ignorance!

... later ...

Squeaky Voiced Teen: This book must be out of date: I don't see "Prussia", "Siam", or "autogyro".
Burns: Well, keep looking!

Interesting

It looks like it's very prone to cut things into small pieces - like people's heads.

Too bad that the site referred to in the post seems to be slashdotted. Interesting thing is that the hosting service says: "Unlimited Web Hosting", but obviously it isn't. - But that is probably normal.

Seems overly complicated

If by micro air vehicle they mean like the man-portable UAV's and smaller, why don't they experiment with ornithopter designs like hummingbirds and dragonflies? As I understand it, the flight mechanics for those animals really don't scale up well for larger vehicles, explaining why we don't see 747's with dragonfly wings, but so long as the vehicle is still within the same relative size as those animals, then the only problem is power supply density.

The quad-rotor UAV designs appear to have an excellent mix of stability and maneuverability. Since the rotor blades are enclosed within their own hoops, there's not the same level of concern over blade strikes as one would have with a more conventional helicopter design. Energy densities in batteries are growing at a phenomenal rate, as revolutionary for these smaller vehicles as the development of the internal combustion engine was for moving beyond gliders to true powered flight. Electronics miniaturization is also proceeding at a phenomenal rate.

Would this eggbeater approach to flight be any more efficient or provide an advantage versus our current examples of fixed, rotary, and flapping wing designs?

Let's See Here...

Let's see here:

The design is seventy years old.
It has never successfully flown during all that time.
LET'S SPEND MONEY ON IT NOW!

A lot like the Voight-Schneider Propellor (VSP)

There are cyclogyro like propellors used on a number of ships. The VSP [voithturbo.com] is used most prominently these days on a couple of tugboats in Prince William Sound up in Alaska.

The Flash animation at the bottom of the page linked as "Open iVSP - Interactive VSP Program" is truly amazing, and gives you a great intuitive understanding of how these machines work.

Thad Beier

Looks like it would be useful at harest time too!

It's just a tiny difference in the wing to body ratio... http://www.oznet.ksu.edu/webbuilder/DjVu/samples/combines/red%20combine%20300dpi%20gimp.jpg [ksu.edu]

What advantage?

So why not use an auto gyro ala James Bond.

Of course everybody knows the best UAVs look like spitfires. I'd sign up for a sortie or two, hope and glory blaring in the headphones, stiff upper lip, handle bar mustache, ridiculously fake old etonian accent etc etc. Although I would draw the line at the very spiffy Douglas Bader replacement legs.

Consider this design for their server?

Maybe they ought to look into a cyclogyro server cooling device in order to outmaneuver a slashdotting?

Missing Link . . . Found.

For whatever reason (unslashdoting perhaps) the actual link is one off from the link in the story.
Here is http://www.robotworldnews.com/100195.htm [robotworldnews.com] the working link.

rotodyne is the answer for v22 replacement...

the fairy rotodyne was a much better design, and in the mid 50s had remarkable decent preformace metrics compared with today's v22. With modern technology the basic design should be able to surpass the v22. Why this wasn't done is anyones guess. My bet: a "jets are cool propellers are old attitude."

How can that be a viable design?

I see paddle wheels fell into disfavor with ships around 1850 or so, having been replaced by the vastly superior propellor; why are there aeronautics engineers contemplating using them on airplanes in the 21st century?

IEEE paper

For those who are interested in the ACTUAL paper instead of a nested summary here is the link to IEEE http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?isnumber=4351918&arnumber=4351934&count=17&index=11 [ieee.org] if you or your university has a subscription you can get the full PDF here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/3516/4351918/04351934.pdf?tp=&isnumber=4351918&arnumber=4351934 [ieee.org]

And even if they can't get it to fly

It'll make a really cool farm combine -- much better looking than the ugly monstrosities they have now...

The FanWing is somewhat similar

Something already flying as a UAV:

www.fanwing.com [fanwing.com]

From NY Times [nytimes.com]
When you first see the FanWing, you think: there's no way that thing is going to fly. After all, it looks less like an airplane than a big, lumbering combine harvester that has somehow strayed from its wheat field. It has a hollow cylinder where its wings ought to be, and when it trundles down the runway, it moves barely faster than a bicycle. But then it lifts off, angles up and -- whoa -- soars up into the sky.

Also, Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Re:Oblig

Cyclogyro is just his lame American name. When the character was originated in Japan in 1981 Cyclogyro's name was Gyro Robo.

Re:Gyroplanes today.

The page didn't load.. Slashdot effect! I couldn't read it.

Cyclogyro != Gyroplane

Gyroplanes use unpowered rotors that rotate horizontally for lift. The cyclogyro of this article uses horizontally mounted, powered wings rotating vertically for lift. It's a different beast.

Nice video, though :)

Re:Gyroplanes today.

There is a difference between the cyclogyro and the autogyro (gyroplane). The cyclogyro uses powered rotating wings to generate the lift. The engine actively turnes those rotating wings, which rotate along the sides of the aircraft.

An autogyro, however, uses a propeller, just like a fixed-winged prop-driven aircraft, to generate thrust. The rotary wings are on the top of the craft and are _not_ driven by the engine. They are in "autorotation", which means they rotate because of the other stuff going on around them (movement relative to air d/t thrust, etc). This autorotation (one-directional clutch) generates lift.

They are very different aircraft. The autogyro / gyroplane is well known and understood. The cyclogyro, OTOH, is a bit of an odd design. It would be interesting to see one work.

Re:Reminds me of something similar

Which one of the Wright brothers are you? I mean, try to imagine what you're describing, but instead of a longitudinally mounted turbine, let's have a... propeller...

Re:And another set of rotors on the tail?

So they would need yet another rotor to keep the tail in the air? Or give up the hovering claim and settle for STOL.

Yes. Like a helicopter: Either a tail rotor (up/down rather than right/left) or two sets of cyclogyro wings fore/aft. Else no pitch control and no compensation for the pitch drag from the wing rotation during hovering.

Re:flying motorcycle

Looks like just an ordinary autogyro. Those have been around for a LONG time.