Part 1 | How To Design Airplane Wings in Fusion 360 - Airfoils [Episode 2]

wings how on earth do you even begin to design them in fusion 360. i'm terence this is rc cad to vr and this is the episode where we start designing a wing infusion 360 for our rc airplanes but hold your horses there are two things that i want to discuss first if you have not watched episode 1 on how to start designing an airplane in fusion 360 i strongly recommend you go back to that episode watch it first because there are several things that we do in that particular episode that i'm going to build upon within this episode and the bigger thing that i want to talk about thank you thank you thank you to matt morley of minneapolis minnesota for making a very generous contribution to my tip jar on rc cad to vr your contribution is going to go a long way to help me continue making these episodes for everyone and for the further development of the l-1011 rc kit when it becomes available also i want to thank james bedoya of miami florida who also made a contribution it is absolutely crazy to think that there are people out there that are really enjoying this work and are getting something out of it and feel compelled to actually make a contribution so just thank you so much i'm so grateful for it for your support thank you very much now on to what you guys are all here for let's start designing the wing let's head back to the computer and get this thing on the road that sounded funny okay before we get started there's one thing that you're gonna have to do and that is install a script into fusion 360 called airfoil dat to spline but don't panic it is actually very very simple to install what i've done is i've created a companion article on my website that is going to complement this particular tutorial and the link is down below in the description it has everything that you're going to need in all of the reference materials in order to actually do this particular tutorial now that particular script like i said is very easy to install all you have to do is follow those instructions and we'll be off to the races so go ahead and do that pause this video get that installed and then head on back and we'll continue make sure all seats are in the upright position and trays are put away before we take off hopefully that wasn't too difficult to get installed if you did have challenges with it please let me know in the comments so that way i can update the instructions on the website so that way others have an easier time with getting it installed but hopefully i did an okay job with helping you get that installed so now that we've got that done let's go ahead and move into actually working on the first step which is adding in our construction planes in three critical parts that we're going to need for the actual design of our airplane wing so let's go ahead and head into fusion 360 and get this thing started this is where we're going to start working on the wings currently you can see we've got the the profile view of our l-1011 or whichever model you might be working on and as you can see we've got our formers in place from what we did in episode one how to design an rc airplane in fusion 360. now we're going to build on that and before we can actually start working on the weighing there are several things that we need to do we need to set up all of our workspace in order to actually build out the pieces that we need so the first thing that needs to be done is we need to set the construction planes in place before we begin anything so i am going to go ahead and i'm going to turn off my profile view and now we've just got our formers what i'm going to do now is i'm going to add my offset plane which is a construction plane but it's called offset plane from up here tap on that and i'm going to now actually change the scale of this a little bit and the next thing that i want to do is i want to move this to the wing root so i'm going to select the construction plane and then i'm going to press m for move and you can see now we've got our triad move tool here and we're going to start moving this into place now i'm going to get my top view in place and you can see it's currently positioned right in the center that's not where we want it so i'm going to turn on my footprint and now you can see our footprint and now we know where our wing root is going to be so i'm going to now move this and put this in place here okay now i want to make sure that i'm as close to the fuselage as i can get the edge of the fuselage here so it's not letting me do that so let me move this by 7.5 and we're almost there let's do 7.6 that looks good okay so i'm going to click ok now the last thing we want to do is we want to scale this construction plane to the right size so i'm going to take this pull on this side right here and pull it to right about there so now we've pretty much got the wing root plane in place now the last thing i want to do is i want to make sure that i have this in the right position from a profile view so i'm going to select it again press move and now i'm going to move this up into place so you can see here that this is actually where the wing root is we're going to ignore this area because that's actually the fairing but the actual wing starts right about here so i'm going to make sure that this is in the right place and i'm going to click ok now we've got our first construction plane in place to where our wing route is going to go now the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to select this and then i'm going to right click and select copy and then i'm going to right click again after i do that and i'm going to say paste you can do command c or you can do control c depending on whether you're a mac or pc but right click gets you that option as well so now it's giving me the triad to move i'm going to move this one out and you can see now i'm moving it out and i've got a copy of that now this one needs to actually be placed in a different place so let me reselect this and now i'm going to go back to my top view and i'm going to turn on my footprint again so i can see what i'm working with now you can see that at this point at the end of the main flap we actually have this angle change in the wing and so i'm going to put a construction plane right at that point and this is very important that you do that if your model has this particular configuration which most airliners do have something similar to this and then i'm going to come over here to my elevation view or my profile view and i'm going to make sure that i'm in the right position here and then i'm going to change the size of this let me get not so tall because we don't need that much space and now one last thing i'm going to do is i'm going to actually look at the elevation view which is the front view and i'm going to make sure that this sits and that i've got the right thickness as you can see here we've got this yellow line so i just want to make sure that i'm covering the entire area and in fact i do so one more to go so now i'm going to come back in here let me turn these off so we can see it easier select this and again command c or control c for copy and then command v for paste so now i'm going to move this out again and this one is going to go to the wing tip back to the footprint view and i'm going to move this into place now this is a little bit different because we're not going to actually set this directly on the edge because we've got this curvature here so i'm going to actually put this right about here just ahead of this curvature and that will be where our airfoil our final airfoil will sit so i'm going to say okay now i'm going to shrink this down to get it to about the right size now you don't obviously you don't have to do this but it's easier for you to see which which construction plane you're working with when you size it this way so now i need to make sure that i'm in the right place so i'm going to look at my profile view and as you can see we're just a little bit low we need to raise this up a little bit so i'm going to select this hit m for move we get our little tool and then i'm going to drag this up to make sure that i'm covering that area hit ok and now i'm going to scale this a little bit and voila now that we've got our construction planes in place now we can actually get to the next part which is putting in our airfoils now airfoils that's a very very large conversation and very large topic and i'm not going to go into detail on how to choose an airfoil and what to do and what not to do i have added the two airfoils that i'm using so they are available for you if you want to use those or you can go to airfoiltools.com and find your own airfoils now there are a couple of things to that you're going to need to know before you decide on your own airfoils and i also would recommend you don't design your own because you want to have predictable outcomes and results in in the wing that you're designed so when you're actually deciding on which airfoil you want to use you'll notice that there are several charts well one in particular is actually important for the lift coefficient it's known as the lift coefficient versus alpha chart and it's a c l v alpha it's an example like i have put right here that's what that chart looks like and a quick way to understand how this chart works is the uh slope indicates how much lift is generated based on the angle of attack of the wing and at the top of the slope where it curves off that's actually where the wing will stall based on the angle of attack you'll also need to know the reynolds number and you can do the research on your own on that but the reynolds number is basically how fast you're moving through the air it'll give you a number and then that's plotted on that particular chart so when you're choosing your airfoil make sure you're choosing an airfoil that's going to behave the way you want it to behave in your airplane so once you've got that done we're going to go ahead and start placing these airfoils now having the airfoil script installed in fusion 360 now we can use that to import our airfoils the first one that i'm going to import is the root airfoil i'm going to show you a little hack before we actually get to adding our first airfoil so i'm going to look at my top view and turn on my footprint what i want to do is i want to get the measurement or the cord from the trailing edge of the root to the leading edge of the root and a quick way to do that is if you use the box tool click on that and then click one time at the end and then you can click hold and drag all the way to here and what you'll notice is the dimension is right there and it's already selected so if you go and hit command c or control c that will copy it and then simply hit escape and we didn't actually create a box but we got the measurement it is a bit of a hack you do have this measuring capability but it doesn't work on just an empty surface so that's a neat little hack that you can use to get that measurement one last thing before i go too deep into this some of you guys are going to want to click click click click click fast forward i recommend you don't do that because each of these airfoils i have a slightly different step and a slightly different process that i use for each of them so you're not going to want to miss those because they are kind of important all right so back to it so now that we've got the measurement on our clipboard the next thing that i'm going to do is hold down shift and then press s which is now going to bring up our script and add-ins and here you can see we've got our airfoil dat to spline script which we added so i'm going to double tap that and over here you can see the airfoil parameters this is where we're going to enter in a couple of bits of information if you see here we've got the cord and the cord we already have on our clipboard so i'm going to take that delete i'm going to paste that in there you can see now we've got that pasted in there that's going to get us the right cord for our airfoil next we're going to select our construction plane which is the route construction plane and then we press ok now it's going to ask you for your dat file and you should have already downloaded your files for the airfoils that you're wanting to have and in this case for the root i'm going to choose this nasa sc2 air foil so i'm going to select that and i'm going to press open you're not going to see it and your construction plane is going to go away but don't worry it's actually there it's just not quite in the right place where are you there we are now why it does this i have no idea i have not been able to crack the code on why this issue happens it's way back here at the tail but that's really not big of a big deal we can just move that into place so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come and i'm going to select the actual sketch here and i'm going to press move again because i want to actually move this sketch you can see it puts us in this weird position so what i want to do is i want to actually zoom in to this sketch and what i want to do is i want to select the pivot point which is done here set pivot so i'm going to select that and then i'm going to press the very leading edge node and then once that's done hit done and now you've got this where you actually can move it the way where you actually want it so i'm going to move this actually into place we're going to zoom in here and i'm going to position this right there i am going to take this airfoil and i'm actually going to rotate it by about one and a half degrees increasing its angle of incidence i want to increase how much lift this plus this airfoil is going to generate when the plane is at level flight or going down a level surface and now i'm going to select ok and there we can see we've got our very first airfoil there is a problem however if you've downloaded one of the airfoil tools airfoiled you'll notice this is not filled in meaning you can't actually create a shape off of this just yet and the reason is if you take a look here you will see that the ends where the trailing end has got a gap in it we need to fix this gap the way to do this is go into your construction or your the way we do this is go into the sketch right click and select edit sketch and now we've got our sketch tools and i'm going to select the line tool and then i'm going to come here until it actually snaps into place and you'll see that there's a little square indicating that you're snapped select and then you're going to pull down and you're going to get go down until you see the same little square and close that and once that's done you'll notice that this is now filled in which means now you can extrude a shape out of it all right so i'm going to select finish sketch because i'm done with that one and there we go our very first airfoil you can see how that's positioned in there all right let's take a quick breather and while we're taking a breather i wanted to take this opportunity to also to remind you to tap that little subscription button uh because this video is going to be broken up into two or maybe three videos depending on how long they run and i want to make sure that you don't miss the next episode so you can finish your wing design so anyway also if you're liking this video or have watched any of the other ones i like hearing from you please leave a comment give it a thumbs up if you're getting some value out of it all right enough of the shameless pandering and plugging let's get back to fusion 360. all right now it's time to do the second airfoil we're going to do the same thing now for the middle airfoil that we're going to place and again we're going to move to our top view so we can see the footprint and we're going to do a quick hack measure [Music] all right so we can see it's 419 again command c or ctrl c to copy that since it's already selected we're gonna escape out of that now we're going to do shift s again to get our script add-ins double-click our airfoil we're gonna paste in that dimension then we're going to select our construction plane so we've selected that and then select ok and i'm going to do the same airfoil in my design i actually use two airfoils to have a more strong transition from the wing tips to the wing root however for this example i'm going to use the same airfoil select okay and now again we've got the case of the missing airfoil so we're going to have to zoom out and there it is and then we know that this is it right here so i'm going to select move or the m tool and then again i'm going to set my pivot point to the leading edge so set pivot point and then zoom in there we go and then hit done it's very important you always hit done and now let's get to our left view zoom out okay now we're going to move this into position all right this one's not going to be as easy to position we're going to need a couple of views to do this so i'm going to get this in the general vicinity so now i'm going to move to the top view see the footprint and i'm going to move this to the leading edge right there then i need to look at the elevation front on view so i'm going to turn on the elevation view you can see i'm a little bit high well not high but you get the point okay so i'm going to pull this down to right about there and so now we've got this positioned exactly where we need it and we're going to press ok and voila we've got our second airfoil in place now we're going to repeat this one last time this time for the wingtip airfoil and like before i'm going to get a measurement of how long this is going to be so i'm going to select my box tool select here and drag across till i get to that then copy escape come back in here shift s airfoil i'm going to come in here paste in my size and then select the canvas or the construction plane i want press ok this time i want to use the curtis c airfoil i'm going to select ok and again we've got the case of the missing airfoil that's way over here so i want to make sure that i move this i'm going to select my courtesy out of this and then press move and again set my pivot point to the leading edge which is right there hit done and now we're going to get to our profile view we're going to move this into place okay now let's talk wash out as you can see this plane the wingtip is actually pointing downwards and that is known as washout okay so i introduced a new concept to some of you called wing washout others this is a very familiar thing but i'm going to give you a quick overview of what it is and why you need to have this or why you should have this at least in your wing design so i've got my handy dandy super scaled model airplane here to kind of demonstrate to give you guys an idea of what the washout is for so if you remember when i started with the root air foil what i did was i actually angled it ever so slightly higher so the angle of incidence was a little bit higher whereas when i did the wing tip i actually did it tilted down now there's a very good reason for doing this i used a much higher lift airfoil in my wingtip than i did in the wing root and what that allowed me to do was actually angle the wing airflow or the wingtip airfoil downwards meaning even when it's pointing down meaning the angle of incidence is downward when it's in level flight it's still producing lift now the other part is when i'm at a high angle of attack the route will begin to stall before the wingtip and this is very very important for the overall performance and handling of your plane what ends up happening is if you're at a high angle of attack and the route starts to stall you don't want your wingtip to stall at the same time what you want to do is you want to make sure that the wingtip is still producing lift or maintaining laminar flow over the surface of the wing so that way you still have aileron authority in a stalled condition so if you don't add that into your wing you'll end up into what they call a wing tip stall which really isn't a thing but where you stall and now you don't have any control because you've lost the smooth airflow over the tips where your ailerons are so for that reason it is a very good idea for you to add wash out in your wing design so enough of the little tiny washout lesson let's get back to fusion 360 and wrap up this episode and so we're going to actually do a rotation here to match this roughly so i'm going to give it about a negative 3 degrees and let's see we're going to move this into place now let's move to the top view and make sure that we've positioned it about right yep almost there just a little adjustment and then let's move to the front elevation view to make sure that we've got this right where we want it right there and press okay all right and now we've got three airfoils in place now we need to come back one more time and we need to make sure that we close up these airfoils so i'm going to come in here really quick as you can see once again our airfoil is not closed so i'm going to select this right click and edit sketch select select and that will close that sketch so you can see it's filled in so i'm going to say finish sketch and then we're going to do this with this right here very end now it looks like it's connected but as you can see it's not filled in and you can look here it just barely connects so we're zooming way in and again we're going to select right click edit sketch and use our line tool come in here wait till we get the square select drag down select and once again we are filled in and finished sketch all right there it is our three air foils this is what we need now to move on to the next step where i'm going to show you how to actually create the surface area that you need and adding in the ribs all right everyone we've covered a lot of ground in these last 30 minutes so we're going to go ahead and stop here but please do subscribe if you haven't already done so that way you don't miss the release of part two the continuation of designing your wing until then take care

Channel: RC CAD-2-VR

Views: 36,637

Keywords: RC, RC Airplane, RC Airliner, Airplanes, RC plane, Aerospace Engineering, fusion 360, how to start designing a rc airplane in fusion 360, airplane design, fusion 360 airfoil, fusion 360 tutorial, how to design a rc plane, rc plane design, wing foil, fusion 360 airplane, rc plane, aerospace engineering astronautics, autodesk fusion 360, 3d modeling, rc airplane for beginners, rc planes for beginners, aircraft design fusion 360

Id: r2uzPa9xtaw

Length: 28min 54sec (1734 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020