How to mend a broken wing

It's sunny outside. Warm too. But Team Invictus has been indoors studiously designing, moulding, sanding, gluing and bandsawing. The new flap is coming along steadily - we have revised a number of points of the design for an increase in bending stiffness, ancreased bond area, slightly tougher ribs and revised detail to the twist mechanism. The trailing edge is now assembled and bonded and this evening we will be bonding the spar into the leading edge.



We have also been doing a bit of testing: there were concerns about how much twist we could put through the flap before it gave, and what that failure mode would be. So we tested half of the old one in pure torsion and the attached image captures the results. We got to just over 20 degrees (i.e. 40 on the full flap), which is more than we expect to need, and failure initiated by buckling in the leading edge sandwich.


We have also been enjoying a bit of publicity: this month sees us reviewed by Jeremy Evans in Yachts&Yachting and also in Yachting World.

More soon!

Andrew