Homework

Now that you know about my dream, I want to spell out some of the background work I've done. I'd rather not get too bogged down in the details so I'll just list off some classes I've taken and titles of books I've found useful:

• For a general understanding of aerodynamics and fluid behavior, the graduate fluid mechanics series at UCSD's Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering department was excellent, and used the textbook 'Fluid Mechanics' by Kundu and Cohen. I also found a second text by the author T. E. Faber titled 'Fluid Mechanics for Physicists' useful during the class.
• For an aircraft engineering background and more flight oriented aerodynamics, I turned to the texts 'Introduction to Flight' and 'Fundamentals of Aerodynamics' by John D. Anderson.
• To think of this project from more of a business oriented side, I took the graduate technology ventures course at UCSD's Physics department taught (in winter 2008) by Michael Lutz of the Tech Coast Angels, where we used the text 'The Art of the Start' by Guy Kawasaki, among others.
• To familiarize myself with the process of applying for patents on how I've solved some of the problems with flying a motorcycle, I read the book 'Patent it yourself' by David Pressman.
• I've also used the book 'Limited Liability Companies for Dummies' to look into different paths through which this project might be commercialized.

All of this happened in my off hours at various libraries and coffee shops in the San Diego area while I completed graduate school. 

In addition to the extra-curricular reading from above, I ran through a couple of exercises as well. I studied airfoil properties in Matlab through the Joukowsky transform (possibly a future post?), and started porting a fortran code for 2D Navier-Stokes cylinder flow (from a computational physics class I took as an undergrad) to Matlab so that I could more realistically model airflow over foils of arbitrary shape (ie NACA airfoils) and arbitrary mach flows. I also used the open source software Blender 3D to render models of what I thought a flying motorcycle might look like, which I used for the logo of this blog.

An NACA 0015 airfoil, which can be closely approximated by a Joukowsky transform

Plots of fluid velocity around a cylinder and test stream density from a Navier-Stokes code

Another rendering of the Blender 3D model I assembled of a flying motorcycle

For future exercises, I would like to move away from the 2D modeling and 3D rendering toward an integrated engineering platform such as Solidworks and Fluent by Ansys or Abaqus by Simulia, but these are expensive suites and this project has zero income so unless someone wants to donate me a license (!) that may take a while. Alternatives such as OpenFOAM, or CAFFA from the book 'Computational Methods for Fluid Dynamics' by Ferziger and Peric, may be more realistic in the near term.

Getting away from the drawing board is something I need to work on in the near future. I'm also pretty excited about some of the great services extended through my new Experimental Aircraft Association membership, including the composite construction class offered during the aircraft builders workshop in Virginia this February. I've been hoping to build a small remote controlled glider or powered plane out of carbon fiber composite as a preliminary to the full blown motorcycle (AND to actually use the Spektrum DX6i radio/receiver/servo combo I bought a while back...). While the books, classes, and computers I've engaged with so far have been some excellent background material, these steps will help me to finally make some of this real.

UPDATE: I should have also added the text 'Motorcycle handling and chassis design, the art and science' by  Tony Foale, which is an excellent reference for the relevant physics and engineering principles.