Keeping the airplane balanced
Have you ever started feeling tense when, during a flight, your drink starts shaking so much that it’s about to spill and, in a moment of panic, you glance out of the window to check the state of the wings? All sorts of scenarios rush through your mind and you prey the aeronautical engineers weren’t distracted when building the plane.
Solar Impulse might not carry 300+ passengers, but the forces the solar plane has to withstand are proportionally the same as a commercial one: it’s physics. At Solar Impulse, the man that ensures the wings don’t collapse when strained in turbulence is our Loads Engineer, Richard Leblois. He calculates the main load pattern (the force the wings have to withstand during flight) for every single aircraft component.
Richard is present throughout the making of process. During the design phase he virtually attributes the loads to every part, via special software. Once the engineers agree on a part’s final blueprint, it’s sent into production. Let’s take the backbone of HB-SIB’s wing as an example, the wing spar: an ultra-light yet very large (over 70 meters long!) carbon fiber box. Once it’s delivered, Richard works with the analysis team to simplify the tests while ensuring that the wing spar goes through all the necessary steps to be declared flight-ready. This means that real-world situations must be simulated with an intricate game of weights, test jigs and forces. Richard calculates those variables and consequently helps develop the jigs.
Unlike other engineers in the team, Richard only gets the confirmation that his calculations were correct once he sees the plane in flight. Think of your shaking drink… Just kidding! That’s what test flights are for.
Nevertheless, in his second role of weight and balance calculator, Richard has to track the aircraft’s mass and center of gravity to guarantee aircraft stability. That’s when Richard laughs and says: “I basically create my own destiny: if I define the loads too high at the beginning of the process, the part will be too heavy and could become an issue for me later during the Weight and Balance assessment.”
But rest assured, when you see how far up the wings are bent during the structural tests, you would never again panic. You would simply proceed to sip you drink, relaxed, and enjoy the turbulent flight.
#Mobiles #Smartphones #Mobile apps, #latest technology #latest tech news #Animation updates #Animation Futures #Sidekickzz #tech updates #technology updates #New Technology #Animations
