WinPilot and Mobile SeeYou already do this to a very
great extent by plotting out the flight path with climb
rate indicated on the moving map display. I have used
this to return to thermals going in and out of turnpoints
to good effect. They are not fast enough to really
be helpful in coring except over many turns, and even
then it's hard to stay oriented between the glider,
the display and the ground reference. WP Pro also has
a 'climb optimizer' that assumes your are flying in
a more-or-less circular path - it works pretty well
in my experience and can help the pilot divert attention
to other tasks while climbing.

I'm not sure you really need the strain guages to do
this as you already can measure rate of climb directly,
either through differential altitude readings from
the GPS, or more precisely through the TE pressure
system. I believe the CAI 302 also has an accelerometer
built in, so if you want to use acceleration you can
get it directly rather than having to derive it from
wing strain.

9B

At 14:48 09 July 2004, Ventus45 wrote:
And so could we, if we installed strain gauges along
the spars, say at 5
foot intervals, and connected them up to a minicomputer
which read them, add
an accelerometer, a standard netto vario setup, a gps,
and some fancy
software, and we should be able to create a computer
display that will be
able to produce a PPI 'map' display of a thermal as
we turn, gradually
building up the data, plotting 'lift' like contour
lines on a map, so we
could soon see where the 'core' was, and centre accordingly.
A good
research/thesis project for some bright spark at university.
Any takers ?