TESLA AIRPLANE VTOL: Design Student Shows Concept for a Chic Tesla Plane

Описание: A student from Norway presented a very interested Tesla airplane design, but can it fly?

The Norwegian student @Alwinart is known for his artistic Tesla design concepts. Usually, he focuses his creativity more on electric cars, but recently he ventured into a Tesla-style electric airplane, specifically a VTOL, one that can take off and land vertically. It looks very elegant and garnered a lot of positive comments on Twitter. But can something like that really fly?

Researcher comments on a Tesla airplane design.

There is a saying in aviation: "What looks good flies well". This is true for many designs of the past as long as flowing, aesthetic shapes are used for the fuselage and wings in traditional configurations. The Lockheed SR-71 is one such example: the scout is and it looks the fastest airplane in the world. The filigree Valkyrie X from the start-up Centauri also looks extremely elegant, although the series production of this duck wing configuration will still take a while to come.

Fraunhofer researcher Florian Hilpert, among others, commented on the young designer's Tesla design. In general, tri-copters (i.e. aircraft with three rotors) are difficult to stabilize, he explained, and especially with this concept there are problems with the control of the vertical axis. A swiveling propeller at the stern could take on this task, but would be sluggish and would mean more mechanical effort. In addition, the consequence would be that the Tesla-VTOL would no longer be controllable if only this one propeller failed.

The swiveling propellers in the front wing of the concept are also anything but optimally placed: the airflow would be swirled through the leading edge of the wing, which not only results in noise when interacting with the propeller but also in poor drive efficiency. The airflow set in rotation by the propeller then hits the rear part of the wing, which means more unnecessary eddies, drag, and noise.

Propellers in this Tesla airplane design are a compromise.

In addition, the rotatable drive unit, which has to bear the entire weight when hovering, is electrically and mechanically complex. All in all, an engineer would try to let the propellers flow in and out as freely as possible. The design proposed by @Alwinart for a Tesla plane is appropriately elegant, but not very efficient. In addition, the design of the propeller for both lift and propulsion generation is a compromise that only partially does justice to both flight phases. In the hover flight you buy yourself an unnecessarily high noise level, in the forward flight the propellers would have a lower efficiency.

One of the Twitter suggestions for this: if you already accept a complex design, you could also reverse the drive concept. The front propellers could only be used for hovering flight and could remain hidden behind a flap in forward flight in order to obtain a smooth, lift-generating wing surface. The rear propeller could then be rotated and optimized for forward flight.

Structure battery as for the new Model Y.

The raised rear end is visually successful, but also technically tricky. The very long landing gear required would be unnecessarily heavy, or the center of gravity of the aircraft would be far forward. Nevertheless, @Alwinart has also thought about technical issues. In connection with his design, he writes of “structurally integrated batteries”, ie batteries that are integrated into the structure of the aircraft. Tesla has exactly the same plans for its electric cars, probably for the first time with the Model Y from the new Gigafactory in Germany and Texas.

All in all, it can be said that the design by @Alwinart for flying instead of a mobile means of transport from Tesla also looks good. For reality and from a technical point of view, there would still be a lot to change, which could also affect the design. On the other hand, especially in model aircraft construction, the saying applies: With enough or even excessive engine power, almost anything can be made to fly - YouTubers have already done this with a bathtub , for example.



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This is Armen Hareyan from Torque News. Please follow us at   / torquenewsauto   on Twitter and https://www.torquenews.com/ for daily automotive news.

Reference
Alwinart   / 1399360813664714753  
https://teslamag.de/news/design-stude...