PT: High-efficiency wingtip design now tested; introduced at Oshkosh 2012

High-efficiency wingtip design now tested; introduced at Oshkosh 2012

Old dream became reality on 1 flight took place in 1903 in North Carolina by the Wright brothers, departure of this wonderful adventure, fly!
Since that day all forms, from the smallest to the largest, from the slowest to the fastest, the aircraft is became an interest center for all of us.

Since that date the improvements have been constant to reduce all the drags, parasitic drags, and form drags and others, but only one remained stubborn to reduce, the provocative of wingtip vortices, the induced drag.

The induced drag can not be completely removed because it generates the lift of aircraft.
It is 10% of the total drag at high speed, 20% in climb up and 70 to 80% by taking off!
In fact, the induced drag is inversely proportional to the square of the speed, while the remainder of the drag is directly proportional to the square of the velocity.

A one percent reduction of the drag saves millions of dollars to air transport company and, more of 3% of global pollution is made by the aviation industry.
The problem is twofold:

The induced drag creates a loss of fuel caused by two wingtip vortex.
These two contra-rotating vortices very violent can lead to serious accidents, especially around airports, if you do not respect the spacing between each category of aircraft.
You should know that every year there is a 5% increase in cumulated traffic and it will soon be difficult to move in airspace, with the all of these vortices.
Now talking about the MINIX device and its operation.

The nature abhors a vacuum

Everything is managed by forces and against-forces created by the vacuum. You can put any dam at the wingtip, nothing can stop the vortex from forming, therefore, from this conclusion I decided to look me into this problem and focus my research on a specific shape to reduce this helical motion of this induced drag.

In the beginning, to be in sure, I created a rough prototype fixed on the roof of my car equipped with strands of red wool to observe the flows at high speed on the highway, visible and controllable of my opening sunroof. I found that the strands of wool was headed in the right direction, it was in 1997.
After several campaigns of wind tunnel on 28 different prototypes finally I got a very interesting result and I continued my research by 5 digital blower campaigns on airplane where I got a net gain of 6% net on the entire airplane.

As there was an emerging interest in the wind turbine I have also done 8 digital blower campaigns on the wind turbine U.S. NREL where I got a gain of 14% additional efficiency power average by year with less vibration on the entire structure and no changes to the axial thrust.

Since that date 14 patents were filed, which 2 in the USA.
In April and June 2012, actual tests were made on RV4 and RV8 with results far beyond the laboratory wind tunnel tests and numerical wind tunnel.
2 Further tests are planned on RV7 and RV8 in Europe in 2012.

OPERATION OF THE MINIX

This invention is based on three pressures:
1 - The local pressure in front of the airplane
2 - depression caused by the upper surface (extrados)
3 - The pressure caused by the under surface (intrados)
Notice that the leading edge of wing tip of the airplane is continuous with the leading edge of the MINIX drop-shaped water to the inlet of MINIX. This specific form causes a COANDA effect and allows:

- Accelerating and directing the flow towards the inside of the cylinder
- Directing from its creation, a part of rotary motion of the vortex.

Indeed, when the relative wind enters the cylinder, half of the efficiency is achieved.

The acceleration of the air entering by the inlet of the cylinder will cause a greater depression in and capture a portion of the pressure swirling around the cylinder by a helical slot along the entire second half of the device. This acceleration will cause the output to multiple mini-vortex trailing edge of the wing

About the results of the first real tests, they announce to 2 digits.
The invention is on the website www.minix.fr