Hello guys! Firstly thank you for sharing all of your knowledge over the topic and congrats to everyone who’s managed to fly
We are a group of three: Aurélien (sailing since he’s born), Mateo (an computer science and electronis nerd) and me, Axel. We are living in south of France, in Saint-Raphaël and we’re on high school’s last year in engineering sciences series so we have to make a build and present it as a project.
We have ideas, we’ve designed some, and we’ll be building soon. I’m showing you what we’ve done at the moment
My design: using the SSS 56104 motor my father bought for me (thanks dad), the same propeller as @Silvio (Amazing build, check it out if you haven’t already) and the reisenauer super chief I’m planning to use
Aurélien’s been thinking about a turbine propelling system since he saw @virus’s work, efficiency should be better, as would safety and maybe there woudn’t be any need for a speed reducer
Fitting everything into the fuselage would be a great thing to do as it will lower drag
He’s had some fun drawing those wings, we’ve 3D printed @Mab -if my memory’s right- foil model and a friend recovered it with carbon fiber (shoutout to him) we’ll see how it does.
We welcome every advice as we are three kids exited about this big thing
Just some thoughts on the turbine design: it is nice to not have a reduction gearbox, but generally higher RPM with smaller props is less efficient than a larger prop with lower RPM, I don’t think this turbine will be better in terms of efficiency or speed than the normal approach with reduction and larger prop. If you want to lose the gearbox look into using wet-running outrunners, they are available with low kv and high power to directly drive a prop.
The idea to include the propulsion unit into the fuselage seems tempting, but is very risky. You will definitely have ground contact with your foil sooner or later and that will almost definitely result in water ingress to your propulsion pod or directly destroy some of the components. A small contact may be enough to make the seals leak, a large impact may break the unit off completely. That’s why Lift have the propulsion unit separately on the mast and Fliteboard, who actually integrated the unit into the fuselage, lowered the back wing so it would take the ground hit instead of the motor pod.
Well thanks for that, it’d be expensive and dangerous… By the way, love this design, I think that lowering the stab was also a way to put it away from turbulences caused by the propeller
