This place is pretty boring. What would y'all think if I started talking about my master plan here?
I've wanted to build a practical ornithopter for nearly 10 years now. Studied aero in college. Been working in aero manufacturing a bit. Way I have it figured I need to:
- level my CNC/ metalshop skills
- finish my books on differential geometry and vortices. God FUCK vortex math
- start with something simple, like a basic 4 bar 1 wing mechanism. Upgrade to 2x 4 bar with coaxial pitching to get flapping, feathering, and fore/aft lead-lag control
- experiment with the mechanism, also make theory of operation (likely involving medium or hard math)
I think the big block is not having good theories to go on. I've bought all the flapping wing aero books I could find, but they all deal with low Reynolds number shit. Also at least one states that no fully descriptive flapping wing math model has been formulated, so … yeah.
Am considering going for masters at a school for either helicopter shit or unsteady aero. Unsteady would just be 1 class though, so I'd do other stuff.
So a two-prong experimental + exploratory analytical is the idea. Maybe something comes of it.
