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Optimizing fairings for local airflow

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Will Aldridge

Well-Known Member
Joined
Oct 30, 2009
Messages
997
Location
Northern Utah
In another thread Pops mentioned that he faired the gear legs and cabane on one of his aircraft but did not realize any speed increase.

I've been thinking about this for awhile and wondering why that might be. I'm hoping one of you with a flying aircraft might be willing to test my hypothesis, which is;

The corkscrew shaped prop slipstream requires that the fairings be set at different AoA's at different locations in order to actually reduce drag.

55CKC.png

You can see in the above pic the way the air is spiraling around the fuselage.

The way I would like to test that hypothesis is to mount multiple AoA gauges as seen in this video:


to different locations of an aircraft. For example mount at least 6 of them to the lift strut to see if the AoA changes from inside the prop arc to out in the clean air, with a gopro filming it.

If my theory is correct an aircraft (cub style) with optimized fairings would look like the builder got really sloppy(with twisted fairings), but would actually be a couple mph faster for no additional weight than a aircraft that has regular fairings.

It's important to note that there are 2 schools of thought on the subject of drag reduction.

1. The fast glass crowd which generally seem to believe that if your plane can't cruise at least 200 kts why the hell do you even own it?

2. The low and slow crowd that go experiment with and believe that drag reduction is critical to increasing range and climb rate.

After having spoken to and read the online comments of quite a few in the second camp I find myself firmly in that camp as well. So if you're of the opinion that drag reduction on a 100 mph plane is pointless I'm going to ignore you, but even so if I'm right the F1 rockets could potentially benefit from this on the gear leg fairings.
 
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