Hello Folks, hoping the New Year is going well. I finally figured out how to make a hollow flying device that has as its shape a real airfoil (it’s the ah80136 airfoil). I am working to finish the flight control devices for it so that it can fly with controlled flight. I wanted to smooth it because it looks prettier, but I wanted folks to be able to peer inside it…so I removed the flat ends of the wing tips, then smoothed it so the smoothing did not include the wingtips in the smoothed surface. Then I put the wing tips back in and now I can give them their own material and lower the opacity so folks can look around in there. Neat! I decided to make a larger version and take it out for a photoshoot. I asked some of my manikins if they wanted to fly along, they said, “Sure, but not unless you fix it so we can see out to see where we’re going.” So I put a clear glass canopy up at the front. I wanted to do the photoshoot at the Grand Canyon, but Google Earth would not open the Grand Canyon for some reason, so I looked around for a canyon with mountains in the background and found Gunnison River and there’s a canyon there, but I didn’t keep the lat-long numbers. I added to the skp file the aerodynamic values for the drone. I wanted it to be launched via an air pressure boost from a pneumatic cannon. If it leaves the cannon at 888 feet/second of airspeed, it will rise straight up to an altitude of 7440 feet and will have an airspeed then of 168 feet/second. Of note, the drone is 4.16 feet long and an un-aided normal human eye cannot fully perceive this drone at that altitude. I thought that was pretty interesting. These ailerons need to be stout enough that they can seal up the drone during its phase in the cannon barrel and then deploy to modulate its flight. They are at a fixed angle of attack and achieve their variability of control function by changing the amount to which they are extended. Most modern airfoils tend to create a force to pitch the airfoil over and upside down (it flips forward over its nose). Thus a downward force is needed at the tail to counteract this roll-over pitch force. This is the purpose of the larger aileron in the middle of the drone there at the back. The airfoil is a complex curve. It is easy to get a 3D solid using extrude (push-pull), but I wanted the skin to be uniformly 1/8th inch thick at all places, sigh. I was not able to figure a way to get Sketchup to do that. I think that might be a useful extension. One could click on a complex curved surface and ask this extension to “thicken” that surface and Sketchup would convert it from a 2D surface into a 3D solid of the thickness requested. I’ll send the skp to my Warehouse Collection, the skp file shows how I was able to duplicate the wing that was present in the aerodynamics program. I did ask Sketchup to export an image, the really pretty version is too large to display here, its 17 megabytes, I’ll insert a smaller version of this image here and I’ll send the larger version to my Smart Mortar page on my website, I’ll also send the skp file there
. Here’s the url for that page: The Smart Mortar – https://pistonrobot.com Enjoy! Dr. Gray
ClothWorks (paid), which I have been learning my way around all month, includes a very robust thicken function. Just take any root-level grouped mesh, regardless of how the mesh was created (curviloft in the examples below), and right-click > Clothworks > Make Cloth, and then right-click > Clothworks > 1 Cloth > Generate thickness > 1/8 inch or 3.17mm or what have you
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Thanks Brian, I did not know about this. I will try to find the program and see how expensive it is. Dr. Gray
another free extension would be JPP (joint push pull)
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