It appears to be some sort of
ground effects sheet that works without using a compressor. It may allow for scaling up and may also
allow for much larger loads than presently imagined.
Again we can imagine a loaded
container on a sheet happily scooting along.
It can be done with a compressor and should be done as per past posts of
mine. If this technology could be scaled
up to that size then a lot of transport problems quickly disappear.
The limited description suggests
that force direction change is also possible here. In that case local control becomes possible
and more problems in engineering and hardware again are eliminated.
We do not know yet were this may
go, but it will bear watching.
'Flying carpet' of conductive plastic takes flight
By Roland Pease
BBC News
The sheet is lifted by the air packets, and propelled forwards
The 10cm (4in) sheet of smart transparency is driven by "ripple
power"; waves of electrical current driving thin pockets of air from front
to rear underneath.
The prototype, described in
Applied Physics Letters, moves at speeds of about a centimetre per second.
Improvements to the design could raise that to as much as a metre per
second.
The device's creator, graduate student Noah Jafferis, says he was
inspired by a mathematical paper he read shortly after starting his PhD studies
at Princeton .
He abandoned what would have been a fashionable project printing
electronic circuits with nano-inks for one that seemed to have more in common
with 1001 Nights than 21st-Century engineering.
Prof James Sturm, who leads Mr Jafferis' research group, conceded that
at times the project seemed foolhardy.
"What was difficult was controlling the precise behaviour of the
sheet as it deformed at high frequencies," he told the BBC.
"Without the ability to predict the exact way it would flex, we
couldn't feed in the right electrical currents to get the propulsion to work
properly."
What followed was a two year digression attaching sensors to every part
of the material so as to fine-tune its performance through a series of complex
feedbacks.
But once that was mastered, the waveform of the undulating matched that
prescribed by the theory, and the wafting motions gave life to the tiny carpet.
In the paper describing the design, Mr Jafferis and his co-authors are
careful to keep the word "flying" in inverted commas, because the
resulting machine has more in common with a hovercraft than an aeroplane.
"It has to keep close to the ground," Mr Jafferis explained
to the BBC's Science in Action, "because the air is then trapped
between the sheet and the ground. As the waves move along the sheet it
basically pumps the air out the back." That is the source of the thrust.
Ray hope
Harvard University's Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, who wrote the 2007 paper in
Physical Review Letters that inspired the whole project, expressed a
mixture of surprise and delight at the Princeton
team's success.
"Noah has gone beyond our simple theory and actually built a
device that works," he told the BBC "And what's more, it behaves, at
least qualitatively, as we had predicted."
Mr Jafferis points out that the prototype is limited because tiny
conducting threads anchor it to heavy batteries, so it's free to move only a
few centimetres. But he is already working on a solar-powered upgrade that
could freely fly over large distances.
The advantage of this kind of propulsion, he argues, is that unlike
jets, propellers and hovercraft, there are no moving components like cogs and
gears that rub against each other.
"The ideal use would be some kind of dusty, grimy environment
where moving parts would get gummed up and stop," he explained.
That said, he laughingly admits that with the existing materials, a
flying carpet powerful enough to carry a person would need a wingspan of 50
metres - not the best vehicle to take on the streets just yet.
On the other hand, preliminary calculations suggest that there is
enough atmosphere on the planet Mars to send floating rovers scudding over its
dusty surface.
Meanwhile, Prof Mahadevan looks forward to sophisticated
improvements in the near future, suggesting the approach could progress to
"mimicking the beautiful two-dimensional undulations of the skate or manta
ray".
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