Histoire résumée | De Sonja Englert (Caro Engineering) : "The SB-14 is a high performance glider of the 18-m class. The initial wing structure, built from carbon fiber using wet-layup and vacuum bagging, was designed by me using aeroelastic tailoring. The long, slender wing of a glider is particularly suitable to modify the elastic response of a wing by arranging the structure in a certain way. I wrote my own software (Fortran) to determine the influence of fiber angle in the laminate and placement of the spar on the loads the wings encounters when flying through a gust. In conventional designs, the bending of the wing under load may cause the wing to twist in a way that the angle of attack is increased, which in turn increases the lift and therefore the bending moment. To avoid this, the location of the shear center and the fiber angle can be optimized to decrease or even reverse this behavior. On the SB-14 this was used to decrease the bending moment of the wings, thus allowing lighter wing structure." |