Giant Airplane Goes Long On Specialization'nWhile not everyone agrees on the installation of wind turbines in their proverbial back yards, one thing not up for debate is that there is a drive to build them bigger, and bigger.
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Giant Airplane Goes Long On Specialization
While not everyone agrees on the installation of wind turbines in their proverbial back yards, one thing not up for debate is that there is a drive to build them bigger, and bigger. Big turbines means big blades, and big blades need to be transported… somehow. If air freight is going to stay relevant to the industry, we’re gonna need a bigger airplane.
A startup called Radia has a plan for that plane, and it is a doosie. The “WindRunner” would clock in at a massive 108 meters (354 feet) long, but with a wingspan of just 80 m (262 ft). That’s very, very long, but it might not be the largest airplane, depending how you measure it. Comparing to the 88 m wingspan for the late, lamented An-225 Mriya, you can expect a lower payload capacity, but heavy payloads aren’t the point here. Wind turbine blades really aren’t that heavy. They’re big, or they can be — the WindRunner is designed to fit a single 105 m blade within its long fuselage, or a pair of 90 m blades.
You can tell it has one job; there’s just 3 m difference in length between the blade and the plane. Image: Radia.
That’s very little clearance, which is why the cockpit sits up top in a bulge that makes the thing look a bit like an enormous Carvair, for anyone who remembers that old prop-job — except for the H-tail, that is. That’s for a different reason than the An-225’s use of the same feature, which was to keep the tails out of the wash of a back-mounted “Buran” space shuttle. With the WindRunner, the H-tail is simply so the tail will not be too tall to fit existing airport infrastructure. The Lockheed Constellation used a triple-tail for the same reason, way back when.
The Carvair, another cargo hauler with exactly one job. It was actually based on a DC-4, and not a Convair, but for a car carrier the name fits.
Image: Eduard Marmet, CC3.0
The aircraft will of course be short-runway and rough-field capable, capable of taking off and landing on dry packed dirt or gravel in just 1,800 m, or 6000 ft — a little more than 10x its own enormous length. The payload it hauls into those rough fields will break no records at only 72.6 tonnes; Mriya could do 250 tonnes, but again, heavy lift isn’t the goal here.This plane has a very specific mission, to the point that we argue it might just qualify as a hack. It will be interesting to see if Radia can sign enough customers to get one (or more) built.
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Recycled Plastic Compression Molding With 3D-Printed Molds
Recycling plastic at home using 3D printed molds is relatively accessible these days, but if you do not wish to invest a lot of money into specialized equipment, what’s the most minimal setup that you can get away with? In a recent [future things] video DIY plastic recycling is explored using only equipment that the average home is likely to have around.
Lest anyone complain, you should always wear PPE such as gloves and a suitable respirator whenever you’re dealing with hot plastic in this manner, just to avoid a trip to the emergency room. Once taken care of that issue, there are a few ways of doing molding, with compression molding being one of the most straightforward types.
With compression molding you got two halves of a mold, of which one compresses the material inside the other half. This means that you do not require any complex devices like with injection molding, just a toaster oven or equivalent to melt the plastic, which is LDPE in this example. The scrap plastic is placed in a silicone cup before it’s heated so that it doesn’t stick to the container.
The wad of goopy plastic is then put inside the bottom part of the mold before the top part is put in place and squeezed by hand until molten plastic comes out of the overflow opening(s). After letting it fully cool down, the mold is opened and the part released. Although the demonstrated process can be improved upon, it seems to work well enough if you are aware of the limitations. In terms of costs and parts required it’s definitely hard to come up with a cheaper way to do plastic molding.
