I've been running this for the past few months. It's a search engine / aggregator for used aircraft. It's really hard to search for used aircraft and sort them across all the different websites, even harder to figure out what's a good deal and watch the whole market. I started this service to try and solve those problems for others.
I'm aware, I agree that solar aircraft is not an easy technology. I'm mostly pointing out how inane this gasoline drone project is when there are real problems to solve. To put it in perspective, the Helios project was 18 years ago and the Solar Impulse project improved upon the tech significantly.
Edit: just got a chance to look at the report. Thanks for the link, there are some really interesting findings in there.
Could you kindly reply with your email, as I would like to email you. I am a crank inventor (no but keep reading, just three and a half more paragraphs!) who has invented something similar to a free-energy machine, except in the field of aviation and specifically renewable energy flight, where free power is in the skies for anyone so it's not totally cranky. After all you just wrote a 27-page draft about it. (By the way your paper is very solid and prominently describes in detail several trade-offs that I address specifically through a different mechanism; you are the real deal.)
I would like to work with a collaborator (such as yourself) and then patent and license the technology. Specialist patent offices I contacted said that they would have a conflict with their existing large clients Boeing etc, and for this reason cannot work with me.
On the other hand if they do not have this experience it is kind of a catch-22. Your personal resources and if appropriate (if it works) your resources at MIT would alleviate this issue.
We can discuss the rest by email. I look forward to your reply. It will not take much of your time to make a determination. I promise it will be interesting and well-specified (usually crank inventors misuse common terminology, don't correctly understand the principles they use, and are vague and underspecified, committing logical errors and non-sequiturs to arrive at their mechanism - this isn't like that.) Thank you!
What is the general range of weight vs power levels are you producing with your device (that wouldn't reveal anything about the tech, only what sort of craft it might suit)?
What is the range of scales at which this device will work (what is the smallest, largest, optimum range for the device)?
Wow, that is really beautiful. Topology optimization is cool stuff.
I think it's key for optimization to be fast so that the designer can get a feedback loop going between the computer and the ideas in their head. Would love to talk about whether geometric programs might help Autodesk generate topology faster.
Near future stuff is probably a real-world component input (optimized shopping), and making things more flexible so you can drag and drop something together from components.
For sure, there's a lot missing, title is probably misleading. Definitely nothing new in terms of the CAD, browser CAD has been well done, just look at professional products like Onshape. Right now it's primitives only for this, one of the next steps is to look at how full meshes can be optimized. A simple example of this could be wings: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/papers/2013_gp_win...
Yes it's considering the weight of the battery, as well as the weight of the motors. It doesn't factor in the props, I didn't get around to that. The props have inaccurate geometry of course, which I'm looking to fix with a mesher.
Have a look at the console for how the geometric program is assembled.
Cool. I think this tool has a lot of potential users, especially if you can make it pick between commonly available props, esc, motors and so on. Imagine how cool this would be if it could make a list of those things and export a 3d-printable frame :)
I've been running this for the past few months. It's a search engine / aggregator for used aircraft. It's really hard to search for used aircraft and sort them across all the different websites, even harder to figure out what's a good deal and watch the whole market. I started this service to try and solve those problems for others.