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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

New Pike Precision Slim fuselage

Samba Model is releasing a new slim fuselage for the Pike Precision. Philip Kolb, one of the designer says about this new fuselage:

"As we are always interested in areas of improvement on our planes we are especially intriegued to save drag - especially on fast flying aircraft like the Pike Precision.
Honestly it is very difficult to reduce drag on the wings' sections as the wing needs to operate within a wide variety of lift coefficients. Reducing airfoildrag at low lift coefficients and high Reynolds numbers - so to say at high speed - will almost certainly result in worse performance in other flight phases than speed.
One easy area of improvement though is to reduce the surface of the fuselage. The latest state of the art equipment (batteries, recievers and servos even became smaller than before and thereby allow to reduce the length and diameter of the fuselage nose. This reduction will mainly result in a reduction of inertia, as the nose can be shortened to some extend.
Higher modulus carbonfibre and spreadtow technology allow for a reduction in diameter, especially on the tailboom, where the airflow is fully turbulent and thereby very draggy compared to all the other parts of the glider.
We tried to implement this considerations in the new fuselage design making it even more slim and sleek than its predecessor. The structural buildup is certainly a challenge, but managable with modern fibre technology. The aerodynamic gains will be noticeable and result in better highspeed - and turning-performance."

The new fuselage is 38mm shorter on the front, slimmer everywhere, nose, boom, root, needs obviously a new joiner, and can receive previous tailplanes with light adaptation of the elevator arms. Jane sent me the following pictures to give you a better idea.



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