The skirt is one of the most important parts of a hovercraft as it is the part that allows the hovercraft to clear obstacles.
Generally speaking, the higher the skirt, the larger the obstacle that the craft will clear. However, if the skirt is too tall, the craft will 'slide off' the cushion and the cushion will deflate or the craft will become extremely unstable.
There are several types of skirts, the most used are the following:
The bag skirts.
Bag skirts are probably better described as "tube" skirts as they look a bit like a round tube fitted around the outside edge of the hovercraft. Most of the fan lift air is pumped directly under the craft with a small amount diverted to inflate the bag skirt.
The finger skirts.
it consists of several separate nylon segments that, when inflated, press together to form a shape that looks like fingers of a hand that are pressed tightly together (place your hand into a fist and then look at your knuckles). The bottom edges of each segment is curved inwards towards the centre of the craft and brushes against the ground to provide the cushion seal..
Now let's go on adding a skirt to our model, we added a bag skirt to our model, we built the skirt with an anti electrostatic bag. It is lightweight and enough rigid.
Our tests are shown in the following two videos:
As you can see the tests failed, but the skirt seems to work properly. We think the tests failed due to the fans, they are computer fans and they cannot make enough pressure, so in our next tests we are going to change the fans.
Gg1