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Blown Lift Jet

What happens when you mount jet engines upside down on a specially designed wing? You get better lift and a quieter aircraft, according to engineers at NASA who designed AMELIA (Advanced Model for Extreme Lift and Improved Aeroacoustics).

The advantage of that enhanced lift? You can use a runway that's 25% the size of a runway you'd need for conventional aircraft. And because those engines are on the top side of the wing, the wing itself prevents a sizable portion of the planes noise from reaching the ground. Beyond those advantages, this design can make wings smaller, creating less drag and better fuel efficiency.

As for the preliminary results, they look much as predicted. Blowing substantially increases lift. With trailing-edge blowing alone, that extra lift falls off as angle of attack increases because flow begins to separate from the leading edge. With leading- and trailing-edge blowing, lift increases with angle of attack because the flow stays attached. Adding the engines increases lift at high angle of attack, but their height makes only a small difference to performance.

This is not some pie-in-the-sky concept, either -- NASA already has flying prototypes using this technology, so you can expect this to be implemented in commonplace aircraft fairly soon.

[via DVICE]

Boeing SUGAR Freeze Plane

Here's another NASA aircraft project, this one using frozen liquid natural gas as its fuel. Called SUGAR (Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research) Freeze, this 154-seat plane aims to solve that problem of jet aircraft gobbling fuel like there's no tomorrow.

Why natural gas? Because there's so much of it -- particularly in the United States -- and it creates less pollution. In addition, this design requires 64% less fuel than a typical 737 you might be flying today.

[via The Verge]

source: mashable