How does a wing in ground craft work? What is ground effects?
Could this be used for safe public transportation?
In: 1
Car wings aren’t normally what we think as ground effects. They are like airplanes, but inverted to push the car down. Ground effects are about the shape of the car interacting with the ground below it through the air boundary layer between the two. Done right, it can in effect suck the car to the ground, thus more downforce without wings.
However, this really only matters for cornering, and the effect is only significant at higher speeds. So unless you have a city bus cornering hard at 100 mph, it really has no application there.
But ground effects in another implementation can be used for public transportation. Say you have two cities over 100 miles apart on a sea or lake, and you want transportation between them. You can make an airplane with short, stubby wings that wouldn’t normally be able to fly, but it can fly low over the water due to the ground effect interaction between the wings and the water. This configuration has much lower drag than a regular airplane, and thus saves fuel. The Soviet Union made some of these.
BTW, Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose” flew only once, but it didn’t really “fly” as in fly like a normal airplane. The entire test flight never exceeded 70 feet, so it was still flying on ground effect the whole time.
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