Blended body with open rotor engines
The concept is not new and there have been a number of pioneers who attempted to develop and put into service an aircraft which could take advantage of the theoretical gains available.
The Horten brothers in Germany designed and flew a number of flying wings aircraft but the end of WW II brought this program to a halt before it could be developed. Another concept which has also been seen to have promise is the lifting fuselage proposed by an American pioneer Burnelli who designed built and flew a lifting body aircraft. In addition to the reduction in drag postulated they had advantages of being crash worhty and having large cabin volumes. There were not surprisingly, problems of various sorts. Flying wings for instance were difficult to fly being unstable.The problems were never adequately solved until modern capabilities made the management of them possible and as a result conventional strategies have been progressively developed and given rise to the airliner as we know it. A long fragile pencil with thin and structurally demanding wings.
Some manufactures have talked of these advantages and have proposed and done detailed planning. One of them being Boeing. The advantages never seemed to outweigh the risks. Not the least of the problems might have been how unconventional they would look to eyes used to the current form. Money talks, however and the environmnt may soon be screaming.
The tide may be turning with a number of manufactures now talking of the blended body as having significant attraction as consumption of oil and production of CO2 become increasingly a problem. Engine and airframe development and aerodynamic refinement are reaching a point of diminishing returns with curent formats and to make further gains more radical solutions will be have to be explored.
It has been claimed that the Blended body, which combines the virtues of the flying wing and the lifting fuselage, used in conjunction with advanced engines such as the open rotor, may be as much as 25% lower in fuel burn compared with the best contemporary practice.
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Evolution_of_Technology/flying_wing/Tech8.htm
http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Aeronautics/Burnelli.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/improvingflight/skyray_48.html
January 16th, 2010 at 7:27 am
I do wish there were more people like you around on the interwebs. Not many people are careful with their words, including myself sometimes. I have written things I would love to take back, goo work, keep it up.