On Friday, December 22, 2017 at 11:28:11 AM UTC-5, Tony wrote:80 what? 80 m/s ... yowsa, that's ≈ 160 kts!
There is a spreadsheet that allows comparison of quite a few polars here: https://www.gliding.com.au/assets/docs/Polar10.xlsThis is interesting data to me, but I open it up, and look at the "gliders" table of the raw data, and I cannot make any sense of what I am seeing.
What is "G/F" ... and then after that looking across the table, look at the first line, for an ADSH-25e ... yes, pretty high-performance sailplane ... but it says the units are "mps" (surely meters per second ?) ... but then the first entry is of 80?
and at "80" the value in the table is is 0.62 ... what is that? If that were the sink speed in m/s then the L/D would be 80/0.62 = 129 ... no way! So what are the numbers?optimal handicapping in disguise.
Can somebody explain WTF I am looking at here?
At this point I should mention that I really have been looking for these data. and I am an applied mathematician/scientist by trade and have been studying risk tradeoff optimization in speed-to-fly problems, this is also basically the same problem as
Is there interest in discussion of these issues? I could point out some issues where the current methods aren't entirely right or complete, that do have pretty straightforward solutions.assumes the polar from best L/D on up is fitted with a quadratic, after trivial calculus and a little algebra the speed-to-fly is computed by solving the quadratic equation. This is easy to generalize to better fits.
One other point I would make ... for all calculational purposes, you want to reduce the polef data to a fitted function of some sort, and boy ... are polynomials convenient for this purpose in this case. The standard "McCready Speed to Fly" just
And when you see this, and go through just a little math, what you see you want for the polar are stated minimum sink and best-L/D speeds & sinks, and then at least one, preferably 2 or 3 data-points at higher speeds ... and you don't need anythingmore than that.
The reason minimum sink and best-L/D are so important to defining the polar should be intuitively obvious, but there's a mathematical reason too ... these provide additional important equation constraints on the fitted functionfirst derivative.
minimum sink is of course s'(h) = 0
best L/D means that s(h) = h / s'(h)
where h is the horizontal speed (that what's really the independent variable in a polar, NOT airspeed, although at the very high L/Ds of gliders the differences between these two is negligible) s(h) is the sink rate at horizontal speed h, and ' means
Forth these two "special" points you get two constraint equations, not one. Playing around with real polar data it takes a 5 to 6 order polynomial to really fit one well, and for manipulating all the ensuing calculations it is the coefficients of thatpolynomial that is wanted.
Also, I don't see listed gross weights for these test data? That is important ... to do ballast corrections etc.
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