Aerowerx
Well-Known Member
One of my side interests is Ancient Technology, particularly the engineering and physics of primitive weapons. The comparison between a longbow and landing gear has been mentioned several times in the "Beam failure question" thread. I was thinking about all of this on the way to work this morning (yesterday??? 1am as I type this---haven't been to bed yet), and I came up with an idea.
First, some background. Bows can be divided into 3 general categories:
the longbow
the recurve bow,
and the modern compound bow which I will not go into here.
Bows are typically rated by the amount of force required to pull the string back a certain distance. If you take a long bow and make a graph of the amount of force against the distance pulled, you will get an essentially straight line. Now, repeat this on the same graph but with a recurve bow of the same rating. You will find that the end points of the two curves are the same, but the one for the recurve bow will be curved upwards above the straight line.
The area under each curve is proportional to the amount of energy stored and that will be imparted to the arrow, so you can see that the recurve bow has stored more energy than the longbow. Even though they are rated the same, the recurve will be considered more powerful.
What does this have to do with landing gear? Well, most landing gear of the springy board or tube type are straight or gently curved. And, yes, some have sharp bends. My conjecture is that it might be possible to design the curve of the landing gear to maximize the energy absorption.
There are two differences between a bow and landing gear that might make this difficult, however. The first is that there is already some energy stored in the bow limbs, in order to keep the string taught. The other, and perhaps more significant, is that a bow absorbs the energy gradually and releases it suddenly, while a landing gear is the opposite.
I'm not sure what a "recurve" landing gear would look like, but it might be worth investigating, at least far enough to see if would be an advantage.
Comments or ideas???
First, some background. Bows can be divided into 3 general categories:
the longbow
the recurve bow,
and the modern compound bow which I will not go into here.
Bows are typically rated by the amount of force required to pull the string back a certain distance. If you take a long bow and make a graph of the amount of force against the distance pulled, you will get an essentially straight line. Now, repeat this on the same graph but with a recurve bow of the same rating. You will find that the end points of the two curves are the same, but the one for the recurve bow will be curved upwards above the straight line.
The area under each curve is proportional to the amount of energy stored and that will be imparted to the arrow, so you can see that the recurve bow has stored more energy than the longbow. Even though they are rated the same, the recurve will be considered more powerful.
What does this have to do with landing gear? Well, most landing gear of the springy board or tube type are straight or gently curved. And, yes, some have sharp bends. My conjecture is that it might be possible to design the curve of the landing gear to maximize the energy absorption.
There are two differences between a bow and landing gear that might make this difficult, however. The first is that there is already some energy stored in the bow limbs, in order to keep the string taught. The other, and perhaps more significant, is that a bow absorbs the energy gradually and releases it suddenly, while a landing gear is the opposite.
I'm not sure what a "recurve" landing gear would look like, but it might be worth investigating, at least far enough to see if would be an advantage.
Comments or ideas???
