The Magnus Effect Drone

I saw a video of the Magnus Effect with a basketball a while ago. Since then I’ve ideated how a drone could incorporate this effect as the primary source of lift. I’m going to document my progress with this project here.

Journal

September 21 2024

Got started on my Magnus Project by learning about the lift formula at play, and a rudimentary design.

A key feature of the Magnus Effect is that you can generate lift in any orientation of the cylindrical ‘wings’. I’m really curious to see if this could make VTOL designs more elegant in design and operation. That’s going into the initial design mantra for this project. In the current design, it can take off without human assistance, one of my must-have requirements.

Note that I’ve left 3 fins off the design. I’m not sure if I want that particular design.

I’ve left the sizing to be very rough at the moment, as I better understand the weight constraints of the plane, which would help me understand the lift requirements. However, the sizing approximations are in the right order of magnitude, based on some rough guesses.

My next steps are to think about material selection and weight, which will tell me the size of the cylinders I should be looking at.

September 17 2024

Started my initial research into the science behind the Magnus Effect, and what existing designs look like.

KFC Magnus Effect
ProjectAir Drone

I decided to create some requirements for my design. It must:

• Be able to fly for 15 minutes
• Take off on its own (no human launch)
• Land safely without damaging itself

Some stretch goals:

• Land in a controllable fashion
• Can be controlled entirely through RC mixers and not a flight controller
• Can ‘flip over’ from vertical launch to horizontal flight by itself, mid air
• ??? More to be discovered

I really enjoyed the ProjectAir video, he gives a ton of insights into his own design process. The biggest thing that stuck out was that his form factor was very sensitive to weight distribution. I’ll keep that in mind.

The Magnus Effect

One thing that immediately sticks out is that there isn’t much functional benefit in the effect vs the Bernoulli Principle. However, the cool feature is that the lift can be generated in any orientation of the cylinders, provided there is airflow through it. I’ve always found traditional winged VTOL designs to be inelegant, where the wing is parallel to the multirotor props.

The formula for the Magnus Force generated by a cylindrical object is as follows: