The Icarus Project heads into its third calendar year with several key areas highlighted for wingsuit development to enable the aim of, ultimately, breaking world records. The main area the 2016-17 team have been researching into is the idea of improving the inlets to increase the overall glide ratio (Lift force per Drag force) of the wingsuit – […]
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Outreach Event: Icarus Flight School with iFLY (Milton Keynes, November 2016)
Recently The Icarus Project travelled to Milton Keynes for the first in a series of outreach days in collaboration with indoor skydiving experts iFly. The scheme, titled The Icarus Flight School, introduces school children to the art of skydiving and wingsuits, and aims to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) in an imaginative and fun […]
Project Update (December 2015)
This week has been a busy one. We have had international help, wind tunnel testing, working with other university projects, a visit from the Vice Chancellor and a whole load of CFD on top of all of this! Starting with the help from across the pond, we have been lucky to have project support from FlySight who […]
Winglets
Winglets. Not something commonly found on wingsuits but our team of CFD analysts have been looking into them. These little devices are used as a drag reduction device on many aircraft and are found at the end of a wing. There are many problems with attaching winglets to a wingsuit such as there being no […]
Head Optimisation
There are many areas on a wingsuit that are less than ideal and the majority of them stem from the human inside the suit. One area of our development is the head and helmet region, we have been looking into how to improve the flow over this area and how to keep the flow […]
Initial Full Suit CFD
Wingsuits in the past have followed the design pattern “sew, jump, observe” without much scientific research. For us to determine how to create & optimize a high performance, long distance flying suit we are using computational fluid dynamics [CFD] to determine the areas on the wingsuit which effect the lift & drag production drastically. CFD […]
Project Update (October 2015)
This academic year for our Group Design Project we are aiming to design, build and test a high performance wingsuit. We are building on the work of two of our team members, Jennifer Crunden and Rob Markwell, who both completed Individual projects in their third year on this topic. Jen looked into how to test […]
