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”.
Seems like a screwy design.
That much material would create drag. Is it better than fan blades?
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.
For a university project I wish it would’ve said how many rpm the screws needed to perform compared to the average propeller.
Thanks for the post
I wonder what the RPM difference is between this and conventional props on a drone?
Propeller airplanes exhibit diminishing speeds for energy expended starting in the 450mph range. I haven’t studied the science behind it, but it’s pretty obvious that it’s caused by radial air flow. These long air augers would increase radial air flow exponentially, and would substantially decrease power efficiency. Most of the length of these auger shafts would be plagued with extremely low air pressure ....little air to move, and suction from all directions.
All it proves is the old adage that you can make an ironing board fly ... if you put enough horsepower on it.
Helicopters have wings, rotary wings. Airfoil-shaped and everything. They’re even of a category of flying machine known as rotary-wing aircraft.
That’s how they make lift. Wings. The lift doesn’t come from blowing down, the lift comes from aerodynamic forces sucking the rotors skyward.
Da Vinci’s design has no lift-generating surfaces. NO LIFT GENERATING SURFACES. All it is is a fan, and a rather poorly-designed one at that.
What this design shows is that Da Vinci didn’t know jack about aerodynamics. He had a fanciful idea about a fan that could blow itself into the sky, but that isn’t how helicopters attain flight, and it’s not even an efficient fan design.
Which is not, strictly speaking, a knock against da Vinci. No one knew anything about aerodynamics until centuries later when they finally started experimenting with it systematically. You simply can’t “intuit” what wind does when flowing across a surface because you can’t see it. No material basis to extrapolate from. The science of aeronautics was developed by men who devised ways to measure the forces they couldn’t see, and measure what influenced those properties, then spent years experimenting with how to create lift on demand and control it.
It would be a stretch to say this design inspired the ceiling fan, much less the helicopter. If you think Igor Sikorsky (or Maitland Bleecker) took inspiration from da Vinci’s design, you’re smoking hippie lettuce.
DaVINCI WAS AN ALIEN.......................