Project title: Ground effect

Team: Príncipe Felipe_Ground effect

Calle de Finisterre   Madrid   Spain   6 Student’s age: 14-15 years old

Can we design a vehicle that produces less emissions?

After looking at the EO Browser and the methane, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide gases, we were surprised to see their high concentrations in Madrid. For instance, there are 59.4 μg/m3 of NO2 in Madrid and around 2 μg/m3 in Toledo. Even though these cities are close together, the difference in concentration of harmful gases is significant, almost 30 times greater. These high concentration of gases can cause several illnesses and that it is why, after seeing this, we thought of ways to decrease the emissions of polluting gases. We believe that we could achieve this goal by designing a vehicle that takes advantage of ground effect to move at a higher efficiency, reducing fuel consumption and, thus, the emissions of these gases.
While thinking how to solve this issue, we discovered that a vehicle which uses the ground effect to move could produce fewer emissions. Ground effect vehicles fly close to the ground and, while they are moving, air gets trapped between the wings and the surface they are flying over. As they are not touching the ground, they don’t suffer losses from friction with the surface and this cushion of air that is created below the wings creates even more lift. This is very helpful because it reduces the energy needed to move at a given speed and this is why a vehicle that takes advantage of ground effect would emit fewer polluting gases. We hope that using vehicles that are designed to take advantage of the ground effect could decrease polluting gas emissions.

We have analyzed EO Browser images to study the concentration of methane, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide gases in Madrid. And we have compared all these data with the values of CO and NOx concentrations in Barrio del Pilar from 2010 to 2023 and they are both very high. We downloaded the data from ‘Portal de calidad del aire de Madrid’ and ‘AEMET Open Source’.
Many of these harmful gases are expelled by vehicles and so, by designing a special vehicle that produces less emissions, we could reduce them. In order to do so, we are going to take advantage of the ground effect which is the consequence of a plane flying close to the ground. It reduces vortices around the wings, which decreases drag and increases lift. This reduces the fuel needed to travel, which in turn reduces the vehicle’s emissions.
We could measure the impact of ground effect on a vehicle’s power consumption by building an airplane with a current sensor to measure the energy required to maintain a constant velocity and a distance sensor to perform these tests at a constant height and check the relationship between height from the ground and power consumption, although we have run some simulations to get these values without having to build the actual vehicle.
We have analyzed the energy that a vehicle needs while flying in and out of ground effect. In the graphs below we can see that when the vehicle is near the ground it experiences less drag and more lift.

By designing and building new vehicles like the one presented in this project, we can reduce polluting emissions and improve our future.

https://sites.google.com/view/ground-effect-vehicle/introduction?authuser=2

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