Human-powered aircraft – Knowledge and References

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Engine performance

Published in Mohammad H. Sadraey, Aircraft Performance, 2017

A human-powered aircraft employs the physical power of a human (pilot) to generate thrust via a propeller. Hence, the human is assumed as part of the propulsion system. The pilot will first turn a shaft via his/her hand/leg, and then a propeller converts the shaft rotational motion into thrust. The first successful human-powered aircraft was Gossamer Albatross in 1979. The aircraft was powered using pedals to drive a large two-bladed propeller and completed the 35.8 km crossing in 2 h and 49 min, achieving a top speed of 29 km/h and an average altitude of 1.5 m. Afterward, several successful human-powered aircraft were designed and flown.

Material selection in product design under risk and uncertainty introducing the conditional logit in the madm framework

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Journal Information

Published in Journal of Industrial and Production Engineering, 2019

Debasis Das, Somnath Bhattacharya, Bijan Sarkar

The wings make up a major part of the weight of any aircraft, and human-powered aircraft is no exception. The wings are designed to use a little material as possible so the wings are made just stiff enough to support the fuselage. For light stiff beam, some of the potential materials under uncertainty with their performance ratings are tabulated in Table 4 where basically Al-alloys, Ti-alloys, and Composite materials have been considered. Some material attributes are rather ordinal like creep resistance or corrosion resistance and can be converted into cardinal by following the 5-points Likert Scale [44] as Very weak – 1; Weak – 2; Average – 3; Good – 4; Excellent – 5. The relative weights of the criteria can be considered following the previous works [45,46] and given by,