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Old 13th Apr 2012, 20:15
  #142 (permalink)  
keith williams
 
Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: England
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Happy to oblige.

Ignoring form drag for simplicity:
Consider an aircraft performing continuous rate 1 turns holding over a beacon flying at a speed of V. The wing develops lift and consequently induced drag ID.
Therefore, induced drag power = ID*V.
For sustained flight the thrust power from the propeller must match the induced drag power, therefore THP = ID*V
In the paragraph above you are using the thrust multiplied by the AICRAFT VELOCITY to get the THP. That is entirely correct



Consider the model aircraft in a vertical hover. The propeller is now a rotary wing. It is producing lift in a similar way to the aircraft wing, by moving through the air with some velocity Vp and consequently generating induced drag IDp.
The power required to spin the rotary wing (the propeller in this case) = IDp*Vp.
In this second paragraph the thing that you are calling a "rotary wing" is really just a helicopter rotor or else a propeller. You are then taking the drag that it produces (in the plane of rotation), and multiplying it by the rotational velocity.

That's OK as long as you realise that what you have worked out is the power that is required to keep your prop turning. But this is BHP.

If you want to calculate THP for your rotary wing aircraft you need to multiply the THRUST IN THE DIRETION OF FLIGHT by the AIRCRAFT VELOCITY not by the ROTOR VELOCITY. Neither the thrust nor the aircraft velocity have been included in your description of the schenario.


I don't know if you have studied rotary wing pof very much, but if you look at the power available/power required curves you will find that they are very different from the fixed wing cuves. There is a thing that is called induced power. It is the power that is required to induce the airflow down through the main rotor. Induced power varies markedly with forward speed and it takes into account the varying rotor efficiency (including such things as the tilt of the rotors in forward flight). Because this varying efficiency is taken into account in the induced power curve, the power available curve is shown as a straight(ish) line. This line is really the BHP/SHP. I suspect that you will find few if any references to THP in rotary wing POF.

A number of contributions to this thread have included attempts to draw comparisons between rotary wing pof and fixed wing pof. This is unlikely to be very helpful because the two are very different in many ways. The fact is that few of us know enough about rotary wing pof to make the comparisons very illuminating (I certainly don't)

I have invited oggers to go back to basics and explain why he thinks that an aeroplane that is not moving (brakes on or hovering model) is generating THP. I think that this exercise will be more productive than thinking up imaginary scenarious about circling aircraft and rotating wings. You might like to try it.

Last edited by keith williams; 13th Apr 2012 at 23:06.
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