PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - dihedral and swept back lateral stability
Old 1st September 2011 | 10:48
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keith williams
 
Joined: Jan 2011
Posts: 660
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From: England
If the problem is simply one of trying to understand the fact that dihedral causes the angle of attack of a dropped wing to become greater than that of the raised wing, a demonstration may be sufficient.

Take an A4 sheet of paper and fold it down the centre so that the two short edges come together. Now unfold it so that it looks like a pair of wings with dihedral. We will use this to represent our aircraft. It works best if you use a large dihedral angle (about 30 degrees).

Grasping the sheet at the tail end of the centre crease, hold it up about a foot in front of your face so that the crease is pointing directly at your right eye. Hold the paper so that it is in a non-banked attitude, and raise the front end of the crease to represent a nose up pitch attitude.

Close your left eye and look at the paper with your right eye. The view that you see is what the approaching air would see (assuming of course that air could see at all). You should be able to see the underside of both wings and the view of the left wing should be a mirror image of that of the right wing. This indicates that both wings are set at the same angle of attack.

Now rotate the front end of the crease so that it points at your (still closed) left eye and slightly drop the wing that is closest to your right eye. The view from your right eye now represents an aircraft that has dropped its left wing and is side slipping towards you. Once again the view that you have of each wing represents the view that the approaching air would have. You should be able to see more of the underside of the dropped wing and less of the underside of the raised wing. This means that the angle of attack of the dropped wing is greater than that of the raised wing.

If this difference is not obvious gradually increase the bank angle. You will eventually get a situation in which you can see the bottom of the dropped wing and the top of the raised wing.

The above process will not explain why the angles of attack change, but it should at least convince you that it is true.
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