水面飛行機 (Power-Augmented Ram Wing) の一構想

抄録

A concept of PAR (Power Augmented Ram Wing) is presented. It will be useful in future for over-water transport vehicles to carry passengers, cargos, and/or cars. It is much faster than ships, while it requires no run-way in contrast to airplanes. The PAR concept makes the fuselage-shape “aero-configured” rather than “hydro-configured”, and so decreases the parasite-drag singificantly. An empirical formula is found for the effective aspect ratio which is applicable to verious kinds of Ground Effect Wings. The present PAR concept has a variable geometry wing, in front of which tiltable turboprop engines are installed. Untill the take-off speed is exceeded, the wing is swept-forward with extended full span flaps (the outer ones are differential flaps). In cruising condition the wing becomes unswept. If the sea-state is bad the vehicle can fly off-ground effect with unswept wing. Thus cancelling operations is much more reduced than hovercrafts or hydrofoil-boats. Special devices are proposed for the tip-floats, which improve aero-dynamic efficiency and which alleviate load due to wave-impacts.