Apollo
Well-Known Member
The July 7th edition of Aviation Week had two articles about distributed electric propulsion and electric VTOL. NASA has entered into contracts with Empirical Systems Aerospace and Joby Aviation to build and demonstrate such vehicles. The article had a cool rendering of a Tecnam P2006T that was modified to have 20 electric motors/props distributed along the wing (10 per side). The blown wing is about one third the size of the conventional wing. CFD shows lift coefficients as high as 5.5 and a lift to drag ratio of 20 at 200 mph. NASA intends to build this modified P2006T so they can directly compare distributed electric and conventional propulsion.
The article on electric VTOL points to Joby Aviation's Lotus UAV, which appears quite different than Joby's distributed lift VTOL discussed in another thread at HBA. NASA is also developing the GL-10, which has a distributed lift VTOL configuration that is similar to Joby Aviation's version. The Joby Lotus is covered here: Lotus | Joby Aviation
I would link the AvWeek article but it requires a subscriber login and I'm sure the pics are copyrighted. But I found this rendering from Mark Moore at NASA that is probably okay to post. It has less motors than the blown wing on the P2006T but it illustrates the concept.
The article on electric VTOL points to Joby Aviation's Lotus UAV, which appears quite different than Joby's distributed lift VTOL discussed in another thread at HBA. NASA is also developing the GL-10, which has a distributed lift VTOL configuration that is similar to Joby Aviation's version. The Joby Lotus is covered here: Lotus | Joby Aviation
I would link the AvWeek article but it requires a subscriber login and I'm sure the pics are copyrighted. But I found this rendering from Mark Moore at NASA that is probably okay to post. It has less motors than the blown wing on the P2006T but it illustrates the concept.
