Posted on 02/01/2022 9:48:44 AM PST by BenLurkin
In the late 1480s, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out a clever design for a one-person helicopter propelled by an "aerial screw."
Starting in 2019, a University of Maryland engineering team designed and tested the underlying technology as part of a design contest. Then over the last year and a half, team member Austin Prete built Crimson Spin, an unmanned quadcopter drone using da Vinci's screwlike design, and flew it on several brief journeys.
Although Prete built only a small drone, the technology could work with an aircraft big enough to haul a human. "I do believe it should be able to scale up fairly well," he said.
Renaissance era construction materials, such as wood and leather, are too dense for aircraft. Da Vinci also didn't have compact energy sources.
Prete had access to aluminum, plastic, electric motors, batteries and computer control systems that made the aerial screw design possible. Also helpful: computer-aided design and computational fluid dynamics software that Prete used to design.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
ping
Rambaldi
Lol pretty cool looking drone.
“”I was absolutely surprised it worked,” said Prete, a graduate student in the university’s aerospace engineering department who built the aircraft for his master’s degree.”
That is just absolutely brilliant!
That kid has a great engineering career ahead of him.
How I wish I was entering engineering school today with all the advanced materials, CAD / CFD, and lightweight and powerful control systems available!
I did my ME program mostly with a slide rule, a huge, clunky Marchant electro-mechanical calculator, and an IBM 360.
The man’s name was Leonardo. There’s no such person as “da Vinci”.
I doubt he really meant “surprised.” I think it’s a poor choice of words. Maybe he just blurted that out when he meant “amazed to see it lifting.”
He used CFD tools and modeled it, so I doubt he was really surprised that it worked.
Seems like a screwy design.
That much material would create drag. Is it better than fan blades?
I fear I did not read the entire article before posting ... again.
‘There’s no such person as “da Vinci”.’
Sure, sure, and there’s no such person as Julius Caesar, or Charlamagne, or Barbarossa, because only people’s birth names count.
Please let’s not say Leonardo designed a workable helicopter! Let’s say that drone-flying technology is so advanced that it can work even with Leonardo’s fundamentally absurd “screw-up” (literally) propellors, providing it uses several of them, incredibly technologically advanced, compact fuel source, and light-weight materials, and all sorts of design principals Leonardo never went anywhere near.
Of course, you realize “da Vinci” isn’t some sort of surname or epithet, but merely means he was “from Venice,” right? As opposed to Charlemagne, which means “Charles the Great,” and totally WAS an epithet he was given. Or Julius Caesar (King Julius). Or Barbarossa, which was a nickname.
On the other hand, even though Jennifer Lopez tried to go by “Jennie from the Bronx,” it would be silly to call her, “Hey! From the Bronx! Call me!”
I was thinking the same thing. You can use Lincoln Logs, a ruler, and tape to make exactly the same design. I’m not quite figuring out how this is masters degree stuff without seeing more of the project. It’s nothing more than an internet meme as presented in the article.
Julius Caesar is a real name. Charlemagne is a real name plus a descriptor. Barbarossa is a nickname. “da Vinci” is just a place name — where Leonardo was born. He was illegitimate and had no last name. It’s like saying “from Aachen” and expecting people to know that you mean Charlemagne.
He wasn’t from Venice. The family was from Vinci in Tuscany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinci,_Tuscany
Autocorrect. The sucky thing is that I had just checked whether there was a city of Vinci, or it referred to Venice, and that’s probably the ONLY reason it corrected to Venice.
Got it.
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