Hovercraft update

[gfish]

With corivax and xmurf's help, I got the mark III hovercraft running last night. It could support one of us standing on it, but only just. The bag skirt works pretty well, but it obviously needs to be attached on both sides, so it can't fold under. Which means making another one with twice as much sewing this time. The single vacuum-cleaner motor just isn't providing enough power, though. I think I'll add another motor before revisiting the skirt issue, to get to a working platform. Not very elegant, but this is still just a test system.


The platform running with a ~50 pound section of track. It worked very well carrying this much weight.


xmurf balancing on the hovercraft. It didn't exactly glide freely with a person onboard, but it did tend to slide downhill towards the garage door.


The vacuum-cleaner motor is mounted upside down in this bucket, which snaps into its lid mounted on the platform. This allows fairly easy access and a nice seal around the motor intake.


The skirt is a tube which wraps around the outside of the platform. Currently, the motor blows air into the skirt, which then flows into the central cavity through 3 ventilation holes. The exact arrangement is still evolving.

Comments

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

Neat. Is this just experimentation, or do you have a goal in mind?

[corivax.livejournal.com]

There are lots of interesting things we'd like to try; I don't know if we'll get to all - or any - of them. We've discussed taking a steam- or human- powered hovercraft to Burning Man. It would also be useful to use a hovercraft to test the zero-gravity robot's navigation systems on Earth, since we can get more degrees of freedom that way than our usual test, which is just to hang it from a fixed point on a pivot.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

swifty!

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

I wonder if there's a way to measure the efficiency of the skirt, relative to the horsepower of the air compressor and the weight of the vehicle.

I've fantasized about a human-power hovercraft, thinking of those balloon powered toy pucks that skate over a smooth tabletop. If it were a smooth concrete surface, and the skirt were precision engineered, could a single person pedal hard enough to float himself?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Easily. Making a human-powered version is almost certainly something we'll do, once we have a better intuition for design. There is a beautiful example here (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uczxhpf/sbw/index.html).

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Would it make sense to sew channels into the skirt, for greater structural integrity with less skirt poof? I'm thinking of something conceptually similar to a parafoil, but, uh, differently shaped. (But then, I'm fairly sleepy right now, which isn't necessarily the best state for producing design suggestions.)