How much force/power would it take to lift a small car to a hovering altitude?

Question

If I tried to make a flying car how much energy/force would it take to resist gravity and lift a car 1/2 feet off the ground and hold it there for a legit amount of time??

Is it even practical?

What would you use: jets, fans, blades(helicopter), ect?

so if it weighed 1 ton and i wanted to lift it 3 feet would it be

1000 lbs / 3 = 333.33 lbs ??

It wouldnt be any more dangerous to drive a hovering car than a regular car!

It might even be more safe with no gasoline or other explosive liquids in the vehicle!

Someone has to change the world, and its deff not people who dont go outside the box! how do you think the original airplane was made?

Answer 1

What Ricksolo !!! Force = weight / distance !!!! you mean Newton was wrong,!!!

Force actually equals mass times acceleration and that is relevant to this question since acceleration is zero (i.e hover) therefore force = mass

Therefore the force required would be the mass of the car, plain and simple. For every force there is an equal an opposite reaction for equilibrium to exist (Newton) Anything above that force would result in motion upwards.

Answer 2

Well don’t get flying and transportation confused. The ultimate in transportation to help humanity get around? Probably the bicycle combine with the train. Flying especially VTOL is very inefficient!

To hover your biggest friend in only flying about 12” off the ground will be the ground. Or rather ground effects. This is an invisible cushion you create by pushing the air down and having it reflect the energy back up.

But you asked about making a car float on air or fly. The answer is not duct fans! Ducted fans are not very efficient at static loads, disc loading issues, etc.
For flying think of a Bell 206. It is about 1 Ton empty and flies with a 650HP turbine. The rotor span is about 37’ This configuration also factors in controllability, etc.

The best most efficient answer to the 1 foot question would be a hover craft design. Total exploitation of ground effects. Here is a small cart that is lifting 1 Ton (pretty cool) http://www.hovertrans.com/video/hoverpallet.wmv which uses a lot of air pressure and won’t get you more than about 6” but you get the ideal. The hovercraft is ideal for the minimum horse-power-hover condition. If you can live with a skirt (LOL) about 120HP will lift a ton easily 8-12” off a hard surface.

Answer 3

Some of the people here have answered your question in a general way, and not quite 100% accurately either.

It is true that for a car to hover, the force applied must be exactly equal to it's weight (mass times gravity gives weight). Since there is a downward force being applied in the form of gravity, for the car to remain in a hover, there must be an upwards force that exactly balances the downward force.

Another poster pointed out that something that weighs one pound will hover with one pound of force but it would take another pound to lift it to the height. This is sort of true. The hover force will exactly equal the weight, but any more force (even one erg or one newton) will cause it to lift. In general terms we can understand, one extra pound will make it lift, but to be preceise ti is any extra force. This poster was also correct in that the more force applied, the faster it will lift. It will continue to lift as long as more force is applied than the pull of gravity though, so the distance is not related to how much but to how long.

As for the question of practicality, I doubt it so far using current technology. It has been done for flying platforms which will lift one man, and some helicopters do weight about what a small car does, but so far we have not yet come up with a practical way to combine the functions of a car with the functions of an aircraft. There have been some flying cars that transformed into planes, but not into helicopters yet.

If I were trying it, I would probably use a system of ducted fans. These are multiple bladed fans inside a duct to control the air. They work like a turbine to produce thrust but require the engine outside the fan. The thrust from the fans could then be angled to produce forward or side movement.

I could see using a small helicopter like the Rotorway Raven II four seater instead of a car, but it would require a 40 foot wide and long space for the rotors to work. A car can generally fit in a 12 foot by 20 foot space very easily.

As an idea, you might try doing a google search for hovercraft. Some of them would be related to what you are asking and it might answer some of your questions about practicality.

Answer 4

the answer in pure base terms would be that in order to make a 1 ton (2,000lbs) car voer you need to make more than 2000 lbs of vertical force. Your question cannot be answered completely as you have not included a time component (lets say lift it to 3 feet in 3 seconds) but anything over 2000 lbs will eventually get it there.

If they were efficient, don't you think we'd have them by now? Lifting anything off thr ground and overcoming the force of gravity is extremely energy intensive. Aircraft do it only at a great increase in fuel burn and engine output. Helicopters do it through a massive expenditure of force over a relatively large area (the length of the rotors) which costs them a lot of vertical speed. Even hegh-powered helos only go 230 or so mph, very slow compared to an airplane.

I you can invent a way to make it work, by all means go for it, but something tells me you'd have to invent a completely new type of powerplant to do it, and that powerplant would be most efficiently used in one of the more conventional vehicle designs we use for flying. Cars are for driving, aricraft are for flying.

Answer 5

To lift one pound, you must exert one pound of force to create neutral bouyancy and then more than one pound of force to actually lift it. The more beyond the one pound, the faster and higher you can lift it.

Flying cars are impractical for many reasons. It obviously takes lots of power to lift an object vertically. A Harrier can create over 23,000 lbs of thrust but must weigh less than 19,000 lbs for vertical takeoff. It can not take off vertically under full combat load. It would be the same for cars, with the additional issues that people kill themselves quite handily in two dimensions, so could you imagine the chaos they would create in three? Leave the flying to the airlines.

Answer 6

force=weight/distance