In Wing eProp patent 0723

foreign [Music] getting near the end had a little rain last night blue skies again we've already looked at this airplane but there's something different about it I'm Dan Johnson talking to chipper when and this is the Merlin light that created such a stir at last year's Midwest Expo LSA Expo lots and lots of people enjoyed reading about that you still will but this has a big difference on it there's a propeller out here in in the wing literally in the wing chip what on Earth am I looking at a lot of great advantages and one of the one innovations that we're introducing here at the show is a method that you can cut the take off in landing Distance by 75 percent and this is for an airplane that already didn't use a lot of room right we're already at about 120 feet to take off so now we're down in like 20 or 30 feet to take off and to land so what this does okay tell me more we have a 12 kilowatt electric motor embedded into the wing at the slot for the propeller and we have a separate throttle for both of these motors linked together by computer so when we take off we can basically we can double the thrust of the aircraft so we're starting out at nearly 200 pound thrust with the pallini on the nose and ready number 150 pounds more thrust we're approaching the gross weight of the aircraft but we carry the battery is it can you can carry the whole battery for this in your hand because we're only using it for say use it for 20 seconds at that climb rate you would take off in the 20 25 feet and you would climb over your 50 foot obstacle in the first few seconds and then you turn them off and climb on the gas motor and fly the rest of the mission yeah I see so this is just to take off and maybe some other assistance there's two other not a not a cruise three functions okay go ahead it could be used just as a plate sustainer if you're doing motor gliding with this ah okay but what it does when it stops it automatically goes to horizontal oh it does okay and it basically disappears so you have no drain you know you might have a little leakage through here you can see my hand coming up well right wing but that's not much the air doesn't really want to go there much well when you're flying uh horizontal the the there would be some but there'll be a built-in Gap seal so that's going to close it off to make sure that um there's no no uh air flow okay a leakage so the wing stays efficient so there's another phase two of the operation is when you're coming in on your final on an approach uh and when you're coming in a turbulent windy conditions you need to fly faster than your stall speed but the faster you go with the exponential of kinetic energy of course the longer it takes to stop sure so if you could come in a closer to your stall speed you're risking uh aileron reversal or loss of control but if you have these uh Motors running about 20 seconds you can turn them on a minute before on the Approach at 20 that's that's a lot of battery even on a handful of batteries a little bit here before blown ailerons and blown tail surfaces if we put the motors on the tail as well now it looks like it's right about in the middle of the aileron was that deliberate yeah of course uh but what you have here is you have full roll control at zero AirSpeed you can you can move the wing up and down before you even take the brakes off zero AirSpeed control of the aircraft of course the attack could do that in flight but now you when you have these coming in at 20 you're much closer to the stall speed you can you can make a safe approach and a normal Landing you you land but uh you're waiting for the brakes to be effective with a little bit of weight to come on them and you have your normal rollout with as soon as you touch down with this distributed electric propulsion on demand you have the throttle which now you put in neutral just before you touch down then you put it in full reverse and you have a hundred percent of the of the power going in reverse and you can have the postage stamp or helipad landing and take off so you can actually go in full reverse with this absolutely with these blades anyway yes wow okay that's cool now you know I'm standing here looking right down the Leading Edge of the wing and it seems like kind of a long way back to the airplane are these Wings longer than we saw before yeah this is a brand new Wing oh tell me about that well it's fantastic I just can't stop looking at it it there's nothing like this this Wing that is a 3D tapered it's all done on the high-end 3D software and every rib is different every rib on the ailerons is tapered every rib on the flaps is tapered the flap is as long as the Merlin Wing it's a full-on slotted flap oh yeah you can see it hanging down there and and it's it's just very effective and it brings the stall speed down to the uh card 103 24 not stall speed yeah or or less oh that's just the wing you're not that even without this Arrangement right no that doesn't count this doesn't do anything for stall speed that just accelerates the airplane so right that won't be on the air the production Merlin or Merlin lights that's just a research project sure sure and what you got the name on here but I'm not sure everybody can read it what do you call this thing called distributed electric propulsion on demand it's very difficult to fly an electric airplane to have any endurance or speed and to carry and all your payload is sucked up in the batteries yeah yeah sure right so we have um about eight pounds of battery per Wing it's basically nothing it's four little RC packs you could take them out they're mounted on this little hatch here you can't see that comes out with Cam locks that just uh hinges down batteries are carried right here is that right okay stuck on there with velcro well they're that light yeah you could just pop them off take them charge them um uh if if this was something that was I had a lot of sorties you could simply uh run or charge the batteries inflate off the um alternator if you're using the palini 30303 which is our stock power plant however this airplane with this long high aspect ratio Wing is a very good platform for electric because it's clean and efficient and no candle I mean it is cantilever there's no strut there you know just a clean light aircraft and it's a great candidate for electric so the number serial number two which we're starting to assemble now will have electric 30 kilowatt motor on the front Okay so it's going to be if you had this option and even the dep on the tail which is uh something we haven't tested yet but we we will theoretically you could have a six motor part 103 legal ultralight well there's no limit on the number of propulsion devices that was never specified you got to back up a little bit now you threw something in there about the tail which I've heard a little bit about but nobody else has on this video so tell me what you mean so the same thing applies you mean you put this same arrangement in the tail almost but we'd use a more like a four or five kilowatt motor a smaller uh because of we don't want to put a lot of weight back there yeah sure right on the CG it doesn't matter and the tail surfaces are a little bit skinnier but the idea uh part of this research project is to scale this up to our hyper stall which is still on the drawing board but that that airplane will carry uh 600 pounds fly close to 150 miles an hour ceiling of more than 20 000 feet and it'll land and take off on a helipad pretty cool that's what we'd like to start making next year with uh the our uh innovation of a d-pod okay so let's go back and let's separate the two a little bit you got Merlin light with the with the this will be the wing now on the Merlin light is that correct okay so this longer one the one we saw before at Midwest was a somewhat shorter Wing how much shorter was it by the way uh actually it's about five five feet on each side quite a bit okay so quite a bit yeah that's a lot so yeah this is a it's got a kind of a glider look to it already it's um and you know about that kind of thing it qualifies by the definition of a motor glider uh but it doesn't have the L over D of a of a quarter million dollar well but what is L over D on this well it's over 15 15. 15 to 16 to one we haven't measured exactly yet but the computer projections are pretty accurate yeah sure well it was an old glider pilot for many years that's I mean that's not 50 to one like those big expensive jobs that's true those are practically infinite it seems but 15 to it's very good you could definitely soar absolutely definitely easily sort of this machine right so we're going to head right away with the electric motor it'll be a really great uh electric well either a self-launching glider or just um ultralight for morning evening sorties and fly around very low because that's what's great about electric yeah I found that out and applied to 300 feet and perfectly safe and comfortable and quiet [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: Dan Johnson

Views: 97,099

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Id: 2EACB8-3wDE

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023