Should Parachutes Spin?
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- čas přidán 6. 09. 2024
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There has to be some 'flywheel' effect that reduces the effective weight
Thank you thank you for that! I went and subed to it and watched that video and left a comment for you.
I like your build .i want to do a small water balloon carrier build .
I would like you to do LESS videos about dropping things from drones.
Right now in my country the government is proposing strict regulations on model aircraft, and videos demonstrating how you can drop dangerously large payloads from model aircraft is bound to work against all of us who love the hobby and love to fly.
Can you please consider this viewpoint, Tom?
I think you should revisit this topic and study more of the fact that the particular shape of the seed may cause it to spin up faster than the three bladed rotor. The reason I say this is because when the seed first falls The air drag will cause the blade to go vertical and it will start to spin very rapidly which will cause centrifugal force to pull the blade out horizontally. Therefore I think that a single blade with the correct design will actually fall slower than a three blade design by a significant margin
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Autorotation. The reason why helicopters don't fall like a rock when their engine cuts out.
I had the exact same thought!
Additionally because the pitch is adjustable, the pilot is capable of just before "landing" to adjust the pitch and use the energy in the spinning rotor to produce some lift as well.
I was checking if someone already wrote that and You did, Thank You
They do fall like a rock for about the first 60 meters. After that the rotor speed is high enough to be useful. Under 60-80 meters, prepare for a hard landing.
Tom could add a servo to the rotor and a proximity sensor to make it flare for a soft landing.
I'm sure he's up to the challenge!
Finally, a solution to send my love letters to my hot 1st-floor neighbor
Try to talk to her/him. Make a step towards your love!!!
Cant be an engineer without experimenting
😀
camp outside their door til they love you
Hey integza!😄
Got to adore how he can just, get an idea from finding a seed.
techonyoursix impressive
like how a plant grows from a seed!
This is what happens when you are a British man in a shed
I know a guy who got an idea from a falling apple...
P.S: Newton...
@@blizzardstr yeah well that is the popular story
Not sure how feasible it is, but it would be amazing to see you build a 3d printed gyroplane and try some pinpoint landings.
Powered by compressed air
Better yet a Gyrokite like the Germans used as a spotter from their submarines
@@johnbeauvais3159 I saw one of those in a museum, you wouldn't have wanted to be the pilot, if they spotted a enemy ship they'd simply unhook you from the sub and let you crash in the water so they could engage the enemy!
@@jeffvader811 Yeah, and they gave you a parachute but from the altitude those things flew it wouldn't open before you hit the water and if it did you would have to get out of the harness before the canopy filled with water and sucked you under. Terrible job and what a unique concept
i agree! entirely spot on.
Great video man! I want your t-rex 700 :)
It's been on that shelf for 4 years because I can't justify buying new lipos for it 😆
Hes got the ☑ he must be legit x)
You wawnt that
I wowwnt theaat
bingo! 1000% correct
The same kind of rotary effect happens when helicopter engines fail. We saw this in the Australian fires recently where a firefighting helicopter went down and the pilot walked away from the crash landing. People expect helicopters to go down like a rock, but unless they have rotor damage, or the pilot loses control, the fall causes the rotors to spin and slow the descent. It is called autorotation.
The record for this was set in 1972 when French aviator Jean Boulet had an engine flameout at 40,814 feet and he was able to use autorotation to safely land the helicopter. Incidentally, that flight is still the highest that any helicopter has ever flown and the flameout is the reason no one else has tried to beat it.
BTW, the American military has a decoration called the ‘broken wing’ for any pilot who successfully autorotates in an emergency and saves lives as a result.
HIDDEN ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED (BROKEN WING)
When T-posing not only shows dominance, but also slows your descent...
And your spinning speed.
skirts too.
What's a t pose
lol nice
3:12 this is how helicopters can glide with out the engine working, I actually learnt this the other day in Smarter Every Day
You misunderstood. This is why it can propel itself a short amount (Destin probably said glide forward) after it is gliding. Gliding is because of surface area on the wings
It's called an autorotation
rip kobe
@@greyler7895 sad thing is that kobe died from 100% pilot error. No mechanical problems. CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) due to VFR into IMC conditions.
@@elekrazy433 yes, I understood but english is no my first language and i could not find other words to say it, but thanks for correcting me, guess we learn new things everyday
Yaaaay! Finally some quality internet content.
You should check the rest of his channel😉😜
haha dude fantastic comment
I haven't finished watching yet, but I just wanted to let you know something. I occasionally fly RC autogyros, and to save from breaking blades and hubs, we use soft balsa shear pins and one of our two points connecting the blade to the hub. The other being a bolt that allows for rotation, so when there's a blade strike, the sheer pin breaks, and the blade can fold back and hopefully not break.
This is autorotation but without the flare with full rpm at the end of the ''landing''
In my final year at uni I had a very similar concept for slowing down payloads dropped from a UAS. The rotor would be tensioned on a wound spring to provide that initial spin once dropped and allow the payload to be dropped at a lower altitude without plummeting. Unfortunately it would have been heavier than parachutes and mass was at a premium to keep it below the 7kg limit. This was for the IMechE UAS Challenge by the way and well worth checking out if you haven't already. The design would also have changed the pitch of the rotors to benefit from auto-rotation, then use that momentum to produce a lot of lift nearer the ground.
I'm really happy you made a video on this as it was something I obsessed over for the better part of a year. Great work!
I'd love to see some experiments with a bit of twist to the blades and some taper/elliptical planform.
As an ex-skydiver, I doubt that rotors will replace parafoils even if they could be made better...foils can bounce off each other and are not chopping devices after landing!
In WW2, the U.S. Army used a single blade case, like a very large version the leaf shown in the video, to airdrop a vacuum tube radio without damage. The spinning case was less subject to wind drift allowing more accurate drops.
Since years I was wondering how exactly a Autorotor works and never found a good explanation. You did that in 30s and now I understand. THANKS!
YES
can we expect a tom vs william osman egg drop comp sometime soon?
i second this
peter sripol used the auto rotation technique against osman already
Yeah we need to see that!
@@TillmansRogue link?
Please do this
All of my kids had "protect an egg when dropped" competitions when they were in school . They made 4 blade ( two upper & two slightly lower ) balsa wood devices based on the auto rotation paper heli .... worked great to protect the egg !
All schools should have many lessons like this, just to engage thought process at least.
this isnt cheap
You would love the MTA boomerang. If you are not familiar look them up on here. I think you will be very impressed with how long they can stay in flight. Sometimes up to 3--5 minutes in thrown properly.
You kinda look like Ed Sheeran if he had an aerospace degree
Great explanation, I love how you always take some time to talk about the WHY, instead of just going, oh here's a thing I made.
Good to learn. 60+% of the population doesn't care "why". YES, sad but true !!!
Another reason seems that the rotating chutes wouldn't work well when you need multiple. Most capsules use between 3 and 4 chutes at a time.
The Maple seed wing is not to slow the decent, rather it is extend the distant from the parent tree so it will be out of its shade when sprouting.
The eaten by a bird and then later crapped out is stellar distancing method.
I would love to see you have a go at a Rogallo Wing/Parawing recovery system similar to that of the Gemini program that was proposed. You could even have a go at a lifting body craft and ways to combine both.
This is probably the best way to plug a sponsor, without having the audience skip it. Keep up the good work man!
Talking about the sponsor while still showing your own footage was genius!
FYI, the design of a sycamore seed (and its rotation characteristics) have been used for 40+ years in the design of Maximum Time Aloft (MTA) boomerangs.
By having a shape like a hockey stick, there is a differential lift that makes the boomerang fly upwards, somewhat along an exponential curve that circumscribes an inverted cone (near enough). So, when the 'rang is released (spinning vertically about a horizontal, transverse axis), the precession of the spinning 'rang makes it 'lay over' so by the time it's at the top of its flight (30-50m), it's spinning about a vertical axis, much like a sycamore seed. Placing weights around the centre of gravity of the boomerang shape also affects the rate of 'layover' (which is like the 'bias' of the seed/'feather' combination -- we're talking about modifying the moment of inertia here).
I haven't thrown competitively for over 20 years now.. but back in the '80s/'90s it was relatively easy to get 50m 'stabilized' flying heights and 60+ second flight times for a 'rang that's something over 35cm across its tips. If you were 'lucky'(!?), you could get the 'rang into a thermal and with a stable spin, it could rise and fall a handful of times so 200+ second flight times were possible.
Rotary wing dynamics is such a *fun* study... (errr, ... yeah). :)
Edit: An old reference, f'sure... but it shows when I had the Australian record for MTA flight (with a return within a 50m radiuscircle) - I was kinda disappointed that it took more than 10 years for the record to be broken (!) ... www.boomerangpassion.com/competition/records/
cool, but could you imagine jumping out of a plane with like 5 guys who had these and the're all spinning mad, better not float too close....
I guess you wouldn't wanna hit someones parachute either :/
This is a great example of the principle that the simplest solution to a problem is often the best solution. Sure, the rotor and vortex ring parachute might have the avantage in theory, but a regular parachute is just easier all around and produces satisfactory results
My teacher made us make this paper toy at school.
It was fun throwing it up to the air and seeing whom falls the slowest.
There is one rather common usage for the spinning blade "parachute"; helicopters. In case of engine power loss, a helicopter wont fall like a rock, rather it will glide down because of the same principle. This is called autorotation and it is something the pilot has relatively good control over.
2:25 it actually landed straight in the ground and sticked. nice.
In college, my team used an autocopter design to win an egg drop competition where resources were limited to 50 3x5 cards and a roll of scotch tape. You won by dropping it safely from a third story balcony the most times. It was kind of breezy but since our drag to weight ratio was good, the spin kicked in right away and the gyroscopic effect prevented tumbling. All of the parachute-like and crumple-zone designs eventually broke, but our copter could have kept going and going. The egg was barely kissing the ground on each landing.
If I'm not mistaken, there's actually a gyrocopter-parachute thing. "Heliofly." It doesn't involve helium gas.
Man, you are one of my favourite CZcamsrs because, like myself, you are naturally curious about the world around you. I like your scientific method in each of your videos and you always get a laugh out of me at least once per video. Keep doing what you do.
5:19 look at how that cloud is disturbed by the wake turbulence
Can we all appreciate how smart it is to put the footage we came here for during the add instead of some stupid video of him on a computer going over a website
I always like these seeds. So fun and interesting! Nature was being creative!
Nature isn't creative. It's just nature. We just think it's creative. For nature, there is no other way, it simply does what feels correct, and slowly or quickly adjusts as needed.
@@DrGreerIsRight Well said! Nature is amazing!
Gotta get my comment in when Tom might actually see it (pretty cool if you're actually reading this)
I love that you include advanced (but not overbearing) legitimate mathematics and physics into your videos. It's both entertaining AND educational and I love the balance! Great work!
I used exactly this to make an egg drop in my engineering class. Carried two eggs safely down a 20 ft drop
Just like peter sripol
As you were talking about this I envisioned a parachute, but different than the vortex one. I imagined one that was similar to a regular parachute, but with flaps that start of closed, until the pressure gets to a certain amount, then they open, causing it to spin, with some connector in the middle that allows the chute to spin, but not the cargo below it.
There's also the Rotary Rocket "Roton", worth reading about.
Another possible reason for not using vortex ring parachutes is lack of ability to steer direction. Modern parachutes offer you a way to control where you land, which can be very useful for choosing a terrain where to safely land.
its pretty obvious when you think about it because its using some of its potential energy to spin rather than using it all to fall.
And during high jumps in kitesurfing, the kite is being "heli looped" straight above head on the decent to generate lift for soft landings. For more parachute expirements, you might consider sew an inflatable propeller, similar to a RAM AIR matress kite, but just twisted in the middle like a propeller and bridled towards 1 center point. Maybe worth looking a software like "Surfplan".
To put things simply, it transfers the energy into spinning.
That sounds like putting things too simply. Can't be just that. To avoid converting _all_ potential energy into
kinetic energy after some arbitrary point (which would be freefall from that height) this thing would have to _continue_ converting _some_ part into rotation all the way as long as it's falling - however, that would have it spinning faster and faster all the time, which is simply not the case. More likely it immediately transfers on that "spinning" into air propelled downwards.
hi .. interesting hypothesis (if that is the correct word ?)
causes me to run out profound (to mee) abstract thought threads.
Correct. All those saying you are wrong are being far too specific when they tell you what they think it really is.
@@AttilaAsztalos Nope, you're being pedantic.
The downward motion transfers energy into the spinning of the rotor; that is literally all that is occuring.
The restrictions on its speed are not related to how it STARTED moving; or the effect present when producing lift; it's lift is directly proportional to its size and weight, which go figure, only changes how much energy it can absorb.
Thank you for reminding me about the paper helicopter. I haven't made one of those in years. Getting paper now!
We tried putting one of these on a rocket in our latest video.... didn't go so well tho
Glad that you are back from the hectic children in the US. Your mellow and professional style is so much more enjoyable.
You spin me right round 🎵 That was super interesting (as always). I presume we shall be seeing some Joe Barnard second channel type content from Tim Station? 😉
Cba to buy a soda stream haha
The small parachute is basically a dragchute which doesn't change the terminal velocity of the object all that much but will control what side guts first
The real engineer is the tree.....
The rotor blade is in autorotation, like a helicopter is designed to do when it's power fails. The rotor blades are creating lift and thrust as the relative wind passes over the blades, angled downward to keep the angle of attack correct. The vertical lift vector slows its descent, the horizontal lift vector drives the rotor, and gravity is its power supply
Me: jumping from the Empire State building: "SPEEN!"
Was already wondering where the vinesauce references are))
I proposed in the early 80's at Boeing that a space station escape system would work like a maple-tree seed. It was considered in one and two blade configurations. It could not handle the wide range of forces due to the required sizes and control mechanical systems.
I actually got the same idea while playing KSP. It cost a few test subjects, but I did get the concept to work.
More struts and more boosters can always fix problems.
The main reasons that rotating parachute are not in common use are size limitations and mechanical parts that must withstand a tremendous amount of force and wear out quickly. In smaller scales rotating parachutes tend to out perform all other parachute types. Check out the Sandia Rotofoil Design or Sandia RFD.
Tom is my aspiration
doesn't aspiration mean breath?
Charlie Venner
Aspiration:
1. “a hope or ambition of achieving something.”
2. “The action or process taking breath”
I'd love to see you do that with a ram-air parachute. What would be REALLY cool is if you could build a remote control "jumper" to steer it while it descends.
So Awesome dude, great job as always!
Cheers mate!
@@TomStantonEngineering
Great job.
I hate to ask Tom.
I got stuck with a project and would need a little bit of advice.
I know you are busy but I think you would love the idea on which i am currently working on.
So if you read it, thanks already!
I know someone using these types of parachutes to drop poison rats into the forest in order to take out tree snakes. It’s only paper, making it very cheap but also it never tangles. Pretty cool!
I've made disk gap band parachutes and I wanted to try spinning parachute soon
Canine Rocket Technologies dang boi he liked your comment 😂
I wonder what a "parachute" that is 3d print everywhere BUT where the rotor is would do. . .
When them seeds fall on a windy day, they can travel very far. We had them on our front porch, and the nearest trees were a mile away.
There's limited potential energy from dropping something, spinning requires energy that would otherwise go to falling.
Interesting theory, but can someone else explain more? Lots of physics can be counterintuitive and I just want to make sure this is correct :)
My guess.
The kinetic potential energy of the thing falling is in part converted to downwards kinetic energy, but also into kinetic energy in form of the blade rotating. As the blade gets faster drag goes up with the square and it soon hits terminal velocity making the rotor bleed of energy on descend by passing all the kinetic energy of the rotors on to the air molecules.
Also when the rotors hit terminal velocity the whole thing can't fall any faster as this would require for the rotors to spin faster, wich they can't as they hit terminal velocity.
I like this as a concept. Super cool
Hi Tom, I had a question that kept me wondering, would the parachute descend slower if it had a hole in the middle. Nice video and a brilliant question. Keep up the good work.
I don't think so, A hole would decrease the total surface area which would decrease the drag, so the falling speed increases.
A small hole in the middle stabilises the chute by stopping the wobble caused by air spilling over the edge. I always thought it also reduced the descent rate because of this, but would like to see a test to prove it disprove it.
If it would, someone would have done it a long time ago.
They did. As a kid we used to put a small hole in to make toy chutes stable.
fruitychutes.com/help_for_parachutes/how_to_make_a_parachute.htm
@@richardhallyburton round parachute do have a hole in the middle, it increase stability and reduce descent rate. Its called pull down apex parachute.
Didn't dig thru all the comments, but this reminded me of my "previous life" hobby of model rocketry (circa-1985-95) in which there is a competition class called "Helicopter Recovery" where the rocket craft ascends 100% under model rocket thrust and then must return to the ground via an auto-gyro helicopter recovery system. A system that is VERY similar to your 3-blade autogyro unit in these tests....
There were typically, three design variations:
1) Ejected rotor system - A fold-down rotor blade assembly that would be either ejection-charge released like a model-rocket parachute, or spring/rubber-band ejected by a launch-sled that was released by the ejection-charge and then the rotors would "spring-out" and start spinning.
2) Externally-mounted dual-, tri-, quad-blades that would be hinged at the base of the blade, spring or rubber-band extended, and secured with a "floss string" that would get burned by the eject-charge and release the rotors.
3) A flexible system or semi-rigid system - Think a very bad parachute with a hole, with a rod in it from the center to edge along the side of one of the slots that would cause it to spin on descent. (for official competitive purposes, this was actually non-compliant because the rules required a "rigid" heli-blade system)
Since this was 30+ years ago we would build these with 1/16" or 3/32" balsa wood for the blades, that would usually be split length-wise and "hinged" with a film of mylar tape or just plain-old packing tape on the bottom of the blades... This would let you fold-over then fold-down blades, so that they would have a very low-profile draft under the nose cone and then they would magically deploy when the retention floss-string released and then auto-gyro to the ground.
Since this was a competitive sport, duration from launch to landing was the metric of performance... So, the longer you kept the craft in the air, the better your score.
As you discovered here, the spinning helps with loft via rotational drag, but when the angle of attack of your entire rotor surface is uniform and pointing at a negative angle, you've basically produced a progressively down-accelerating screw. So while it would slow the descent initially, the longer it spun, the faster it would drill into the ground. Not so great if your goal is to maintain recovery lift as long as possible.
SO, for us "real champs" in Helicopter Recovery Class, we would "tune" our rotors using a steaming tea pot... ;-)
Basically the inner 3rd of the rotor is kept in a down-15 degree angle, and then you'd steam the outer 2/3ds of the rotor and manually twist it so that the tip of the rotor (and about outer-1/3rd) would be at a positive 5-10 degree angle. Effectively, this would result in the inner-half of the rotor "driving" the rotation, and the outer-half providing increased lift as the rotational velocity increased.
I won a number of A to E class motor competitions with this basic tuning formula, including a 8-minute recovery time on a B-class Helicopter Recovery craft that actually gained altitude several times on thermals during recovery. One of the "unintended effects" of this tuning was that in certain up-lift/thermal air conditions, the lift would counter the down-screw effect so effectively that the entire model would flip over, and proceed to drill-itself down. Nothing like lead-tape on rocket fins and walking the fine line of CG to CP offset to make sure your launch didn't go haywire.
Anyway, hope this helps with your research into auto-gyro's... Love the videos and your attention to experimentation and practical engineering... Please keep inspiring us!
this had much less to do with those little helicopter seeds than I wanted it to.
Hard to believe those seeds evolved.
@@kennyg1358 yap it didnt there is no true randomness in reality
Using conservation of energy, it is easy to see why the spinning slows the weight down:
Because a lot of the gravitational potensial energy is converted to rotational energy, less energy is converted to downwards kinetic energy.
Another way is to realize that the rotating wings act sort of like wings on a glider aircraft, slowing down the descent by making the plane glide forward throught the air.
You can kind of imagine each rotary blade to be a glider plane wing that spins around the weight, and like the plane wing moving through the air, it slows down the descent.
This sounds like it could be a breakthrough technology in some time if somebody figures out how to make it more reliable. With some testing I don’t see why it couldn’t become as reliable as a regular parachute.
Price to performance ratio has a long way to come before that happens but we can hope
you can do that as much as you want with mahogany seeds.....
In a falling helicopter, the propeller spins and has the same effect, no need for a parachute
Another reason not to use the vortex parachute - no one wants to be spinning like a top while descending. If they put in some sort of a bearing mechanism it will also add weight. Plus how difficult it will be to pack the parachute when there are literally four separate pieces, and your life depends upon how well you pack that parachute.
Inspector Gadget had this figured out years ago.
I think parachutes should be made of 'solid' panels that pop out and immediately take shape. Without the necessary time it takes for a 'floppy' chute to fully deploy, the jumper can be more stealthy and open that much closer to the ground.
I want to be under 3 spinning propellers when they hit the ground. Fo sho !
That's a major reason why people could never imploy auto rotation; along with the fact that people don't like to be spun at speeds, making any landing difficult if not impossible.
You HAVE TO hit with your feet first, and collapse to distribute the force of impact, if you were incredibly dizzy, this would not be possible and you will end up with a broken leg.
Right now, a student association at the University of Würzburg is working on assessing the feasibility of this to slow down small objects from high altitudes by throwing free fall units with rotors from a sounding rocket as part of the REXUS programme.
Potential energy gets converted to rotational
Yes.
But not all of it
The one which does not convert into kinetic energy ...ie 1/2m×2g h
Until which... the rotational energy reaches a critical maximum. Any more conversion does not slow you down.
I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, but you can explain things in a way i understand and enjoy. Thank you very much tom!
What flight controller does that drone have?
It has an Omnibus F4 V6 with iNav firmware. I made a short video on my second channel about it czcams.com/video/WNniGZMmd84/video.html
You could shape the parachute like one of those pinwheels that kids make out of paper for school projects. It might work better than the spinning parachute you made. Or, you may also want to try two counter-rotating spinning parachutes, or perhaps even four counter-rotating parachutes arranged in a square formation. This way there is no net spinning force imparted on the payload.
Using the scientific practice of repetition to “force” people to watch your sponsor.
Smart
Smort
My university, ERAU (daytona beach), seriously approached this topic. The project is called Hummingbird and is being developed by the club ERFSEDS. feel free to reach out to them or contact me if you are interested in seeing what we did/are doing
i remember that we had a ton of trees that produced that kind of seed. one day, one of my friends discovered that the seed spins. the next day, it became everyone's toy, you'd pick one up and it's yours, just wash your hands after playing it, it's bitter asf. learned it the hard way
The reason that the blades fall slower is that they generate lift as opposed to a parachute which only relies on drag. As the blades spin air passes over the upper and lower surface of the blade and because fluids have a tendency to stick along surfaces they flow over and because the upper surface of the blade has more surface area than the lower surface the air flow will speed up along the upper surface.
Bernoulli's equation dictates that a faster flow causes a pressure drop along the upper surface hence the wings are sucked upwards which is where the lift originates from. Basically the wings lower air pressure on the upper surfaces to suck the whole contraption upwards which slows the fall.
What I noticed was that the ones that used a lifting body, slowed the rate of decent gradually while the ones relying on just drag had a hard upward jerk.
Spinning parachutes are a concept that have been heavily studied by NASA and amateurs a like for the exact reasons you stated in your video. The main reason why you do not see spinning parachutes used on space capsules or anything heavy is because primarily when you make them large enough to be usable for things such as people or cargo, the parachute will not be able to maintain its shape as it spins. They could descend faster, however spinning parachutes also have a speed limit as if you descend too fast the parachute will collapse on itself instead of being useful. Thus the spinning type parachutes have really been limited to amateur rocketry, mostly on the small end of high power rockets.
In philippines
We use that as toys
It comes from a big nut wich contains the small seeds
We usually put them in light plastic bowls and then we launch it in the air
Well, it's the same principle as autorotating down in an auto gyro that's out of gas. It does work, but I doubt it's quite as efficient as a traditional parachute. The positive aspect is that it can be re-packed mechanically a-la inspector gadget.
Gyrocopter drive that to the Extreme. The rotors have different angle and shape in the inner 2/3 than the outer 1/3. inner part converts drag into rotation, outer part converts rotation into lift.
I used a similar method to land a pod in SimpleRockets 2. It landed very gracefully after only a few tries.
The only problem might be the centrifugal pseudoforce creating astronaut mush.
I paused the video at 0:25, my best guess is that the spinning provides stability ---> that leads to the wing like part of the seed maintaining a good angle of attack. so spinning is basically doing the job of tail section of standard aircraft...
Hi Tom, your videos are great! I’d really like to see another air powered plane video, maybe with the v3 engine again. You could also try adding a bigger bottle to allow for more range but it might add a bit too much weight. If so it would be much appreciated.
I picked up an estes rocket cheap in a charity shop that has a helicopter recovery for the nose and a parachute for the fuselage. I haven't got round to flying it yet but it looks like it should work quite well.
stuff the parachute inside a tube ( think rocket), as the weight is released it pulls it from the tube. This makes it safer and tangle free and prop free :)
A parachute has one BIG air inlet and requires an air outlet to avoid air leaking to the sides which cause collapsing the parachute. The size depends on a shitload of variables though.
From an energy point of view, whatever method you choose to employ, you will need to convert potential energy of the height into something other than kinetic energy. Spinning something turns the kinetic energy into rotational energy and friction will turn it into heat one way or another. I wonder if we can use the spinning top to charge a battery or heat something through friction and more effectively slow down the fall.
in the first test, small parachute didnt work well but the big one did, and it has a 10 times bigger surface area you said. I think you should use a rotor which has the big parachute's area rather than its diameter because the factor that limits a falling object's velocity is mainly related to its surface area.
Excellent experiment and I will try to explain, physics my dear Watson, physics.
Energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only change form.
So the energy in the weight by gravity has to be divided into the energy required to spin the rotor. The rotor has friction in the air so the rotation speed is determined by available energy. A wing profile causes lift so the unit fails slowly.
Reliability is the number one concern. All other optimizations are subservient. With round parachute systems you can deploy redundant chutes, e.g. 3 chutes and still land on 2. If you have spinning contraptions this redundancy is eliminated or at the very least you would need staged backups and so the risk and complication increases significantly. Even a single round chute is not considered safe enough because you have a single point of failure, but with 2 or three chutes the safety margin increases combinatorially.
Thanks for making this video! Now you've made a particular person to be curious and be more open-minded to what was found from before and how to improve. Great video!