The Rutan VariEze I first saw this unique and ground breaking airplane announced in a Popular Mechanics magazine when I was a kid. It’s most striking feature is its canard, the stubby wing at the front. Whereas most airplanes use a tailplane (horizontal fins at the rear of the plane) a canard airplane has a…
E-Fan X All-electric airplanes are already in service in limited applications like trainers and for towing gliders. These small planes boast low energy use and low maintenance, but battery capacity and weight remain limiting factors for longer range aircraft. Airbus, Rolls Royce and Siemens are thus employing the same strategy used by automobile manufacturers before…
What are the little scallops for? Look carefully at the exhaust of the turbofan engine on the Boeing 787 pictured and you will see it has a scalloped edge, what Boeing calls chevrons. Turbofans vs turbojets A turbojet engine has a compressor section which draws air in. Fuel is added and burned which expands toward…
There’s a starman waiting in the sky SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon Heavy with the now-famous payload of Starman (a mannequin in a SpaceX-designed spacesuit) in Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster. Test flights usually are sent up with payloads of negligible value like concrete or steel blocks, since there is the high likelihood of the…
Yesterday’s Falcon Heavy launch was an amazing (if not unblemished) success. In the glow of this event it is possible to forget that SpaceX was at risk of failing as a venture as recently as 2008. At that time, Wired interviewed Musk after its third high profile failure, when a Falcon 1 second stage failed…
Paging Dr. Spaceman Elon Musk isn’t setting out to change the world. He has bigger ambitions. He wants to change the destiny of the human race by making it interplanetary. First step, prove that Mars can be colonized. To that end, Musk’s company SpaceX took a bold step forward with the test flight of its…
In an earlier post I speculated about alternatives to ancillary propellant systems for main propellant ullage (ensuring that fuel and oxidizer are available at the pickups in the main tanks). Another alternative has been identified by the Aerospace Club of the Vanderbilt School of Engineering. In this article they describe the use of baffles within the…
“Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?” Erma Bombeck Miss you already, Puerto Vallarta Carmela and I just returned from a romantic vacation in Mexico’s Puerto Vallarta. While we went all carry-on for the flight from Toronto there, we checked a bag for the return…
Electric fuel pump New Zealand’s company Rocket Lab has an Electron rocket that uses a similar layout to SpaceX’s Falcon rocket. Both have a nine engine first stage and a single engine second stage. Both use liquid oxygen and RP-1, a refined form of kerosene. The most notable difference is scale – the Falcon is…
The majority of Principles seem to have a vector, e.g. Segmentation says break it into segments while Merging says put bits together. Some Principles don’t have an opposite among other Principles. This includes Cheap Short-Living Objects which suggests changing something reusable into something disposable, not the other way round. TRIZ Journal wrestled with this phenomenon in…