Structural Inflatables

A real UFO picture of our UFO which appeared over an English Dorset village causing a flurry of excitement and many column inches in local and national newspapers of UFO sightings. In the center an example of our radio controlled planes, a Pull and push-prop semi-rigid Inflat-A-Plane™ and on the right another example of our remote control planes, a 30ft Inflat-A-Plane™ with a Predator type unmanned drone hung below it

What’s Next in Piloted and Remotely Piloted air Vehicles?

The airBeam™ technology has implications in many disciplines and one of them is in aeroplane and airship design, particularly new hybrid airships

3m (10ft) Single hulled Inflat-A-Plane ready for take-off and in flight

6ft Single hulled Inflat-A-Plane ready to be lofted by hand and in flight

4m Twin hulled Inflat-A-Plane in flight

2m Twin hulled Inflat-A-Plane with Canard controls

Above you will see some miniature plane pictures, so just click on them to see the higher definition version. We have some film of these versions as well which we intend to get reformatted over the coming months. Total size of download is 96KB

Other Aerodynamic Systems

Amongst the other systems that we have either developed, or experimented with, have been a number of Flettner Rotors, or Magnus Effect Rotors as well as Savonius Rotors driven by the wind.

Also included are Bird Scarers, Crop Spraying Systems and Meteorological Instrument lifting systems (shown on the left) as well as a Man pedalled Helicopter for the Kramer Prize for the first person to be able to power a lifting device, whilst sitting on that device, purely with man-driven energy.

There are also other systems that you will see in the Military Section as that is developed, so have a look if your interest is piqued!

Crop Protection

The Stewkie Birdscarer in action in Dorset with its mechanical device that enables it to travel forward and backwards across a field. We have developed a very successful crop protection system that does not pollute the atmosphere or damage the birds in any way, nor does it cause noise pollution like ‘bangers’.

It is based on our Inflat-A-Sail™ kite and has been successfully used in both the United States as well as the UK to scare birds feeding on vulnerable crops. In most cases it was the ONLY effective method to keep the birds away from the fields altogether. The mechanical device that enables the Scarer to travel forward and backwards across a field automatically can be seen in the foreground

We believe it is the shadow cast by the Stewkie Scarer™ that causes the birds to stay away from the area, rather than the Scarer itself, although the size has obviously something to do with it, as well as the outline shape, causing the shadow.

It has a unique method of moving across a field and back again on a long tether rope so that it can protect any size of large field.

Crop Spraying

A 20m² Semi-Sail tethered to a tractor which was used to traverse a field with canisters of micro-droplet spray Because the ground is usually fairly uneven over land planted to crops any spraying system is only as accurate as the hydraulic dampening between the vehicle and spray boom and therefore distance to the crop. We were asked to look at the possibility of spraying from an aerodynamic balloon system using micro-spraying techniques with a new type of canister.

The excercise proved very useful in many other ways, but in the end we decided not to continue with its development for many reasons, but one of them was that we were not convinced, despite a wealth of data from others that micro-droplets did not travel for longer distances than predicted, which meant that the spray could have been spread a greater distance than required and by doing so, pollute other crops.

Here is a photo of the system, using a large Semi-Sail of up to 20m² (215ft²).

Magnus Effect (Flettner) Rotors

Savonius Rotor of 3m (10ft) Flettner Rotors and Savonius Rotors (as shown on the left) have intrigued scientists for more than a Century and we have been involved in R&D into the subject for over 20 years.

Apart from the Aer-O-Volve™ that you can see elsewhere, we have been developing wind driven devices for a number of purposes. It has been asserted for many years that a wind driven Flettner Rotor would prove to extract more power from the wind than a conventional turbine windmill, but as yet it is not a proven fact, although the theories look promising.

20ft (6m) Horizontal Flettner Rotor starts rotating, held by 2 people We can say however that some of our experiments have shown that the Magnus Effect, or Flettner Rotors have a lot of questions still unanswered both for and against the theory, but ours is a more ‘gut-feeling’ questionaire that a trained scientist would accept.

Some of them have been quite extraordinary in that for example, we managed with an extremely small budget to design and manufacture a horizontal Magnus Effect rotor of 20ft (6m) x 2ft (0.6m), which was powered by 2 electrical motors The Magnus effect Rotor starts to get sufficient power to curve in the middle and commence to lift the 2 people off the ground of 1KW each, with only 2 speeds (one at the equivalent of 2HP and one at the equivalent of 1HP) to almost lift the two people holding the Rotor, off the ground. This was the equivalent of 400lbs (180kg) in total weight and it was done at the lower speed, corresponding to an input of 1HP. At the higher speed it didn’t have nearly as much lift, proving at the least that the speed of rotation in relation to the wind speed is critical to the power of the rotor. The right photo shows the Rotor with no lift as it powers up and on the Left you can see that the rotor is starting to curve upwards in the middle as the rotation speed enables it to generate sufficient lift to start trying to lift the two people holding the Rotor.

HuPoHelix™

The human powered helicopter project, HuPoHelix™ was designed to attempt to win the Kramer Prize to be the first person to obtain static lift from a human powered vehicle for a 5 minute period.

The HuPoHelix design concept The design is based around a circular high-pressure structural inflatable airBeam™ with 3 wings with elevators, also manufactured from airBeams™, which meet in the centre to provide a platform for a cyclist to straddle a seat and peddle like mad to rotate the circular airBeam™.

The system is again based on the Magnus Effect and designed to enable the cyclist to rotate the system, without himself being rotated by it.

Unfortunately it was not possible to obtain the funds to make the atempt, but there was quite a bit of press coverage of the design and a number of aeronautical ‘boffins’ concluded that the idea was feasible.