Before assembling our hovercraft we wanted to make sure the fans we purchased were able to lift a miniature version of a hovercraft. We first tried by attaching the fan to a plate and making a skirt out of a plastic bag. When researching different homemade hovercrafts we realized that a common theme is a hole in the bottom of the skirt. We weren't sure how big the hole was supposed to be so we decided to go with a guess and check procedure. In our first attempt, we cut the hole in the skirt about as big as the fan we were using. This attempt is shown below on the left. The fan was not able to fill up the skirt and lift it off the ground. We decided to make the hole in the skirt smaller so that more air would fill the skirt. This attempt is shown on the right but also failed in lifting the plate.
We decided to change the base of the hovercraft from the plastic plate to a piece of the Styrofoam that we will be using in the full scale prototype. Once again we tried two different types of skirts. First we tried a skirt without a hole as shown below on the left but this method did not work. Next we tried cutting a hole in the skirt, as shown below on the right, but again the hovercraft did not lift.
After many tests we thought that the problem wasn't in the design of the skirt, but in the power of the fan. We thought that the fan wasn't spinning fast enough to lift the hovercraft. We decided to try increasing the voltage to the fan and the results were minimally better but still not enough to sufficiently lift the fan. After a few hours of trying different conditions we concluded that these fans (2000 RPM's) were not going to be able to be used for our hovercraft.
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