October 2007
Do you have a rich uncle who would be interested in taking part in an exciting venture? Seriously though, we are currently in negotiations with several investors, and I must say, the breadth of strategies they are following is enormous. But if you DO have a rich relative, just so you know, our priorities are simple: we want to realize the vision and whoever comes first is first served. To realise the vision, we need to get serious interest from an investor in order to move this project on to success. Get your rich uncle to call us… he won’t be disappointed.
Other news on the financial front is that we still have on-going support from our various sponsors, and potentially this will be increased on a greater scale. Additionally we are being supported by Bauhaus-Luftfahrt in lobbying the project on behalf of key industry partners.
With regards to publicity about the project, we are trying to stay as neutral and passive as possible. We are getting so much (sometimes unwanted) press coverage, particularly the DLR project, that it’s becoming harder to control what is actually being reported about SmartFish and HyFish. Needless to say, not all you read or see is necessarily true. On the other hand, we visited a few “expert-forums” on the internet and were really surprised to find how many real experts out there are discussing SmartFish flight characteristics, with some not very impressive and knowledgeable comments.
A propos HyFish. If one would like to compare HyFish with a conventional UAV design, driven by a fuel cell with the same technology as HyFish: Please have a look at http://www.horizonfuelcell.com/UAV. Quite impressive to see the difference between the two concepts.
Anyway, we will start communicating intensively to the public as soon as there is something real to announce like a first flight. In the meantime, if you want to know the latest news about SmartFish, we’ll keep you posted here.
HyFish with AOA 25; Image created with Fieldview 11
Good flow quality in inlet of HyFish flying with AOA 25
On the technical development front, we are currently busy optimizing the inlet design for the proof of concept aircraft. We already have designs with a pressure recovery higher than 98% in cruise condition. In order to do that, we use sophisticated shape deformation and optimization software that allows us to test dozens of different designs in a very short time. In this way an optimized inlet design can be developed within a few days. Since we do not reveal yet the design of the inlets for the POC we show above some work on the inlets that has been done for HyFish.
Stay tuned for more SmartFish developments. In the meantime, if you have any enquiries about our investor opportunities (rich uncles most welcome), please contact me in the first instance at koni.schafroth@smartfish.ch.