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DaVinci-style drone with 600-year-old screw rotor design
- rasz 5y agoAnything can fly if you slap modern 7K RPM BLDC hobby motors on it. FliteTest does this regularly, here flying an Ikea chair https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlKC5qUS80o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlKC5qUS80o or Santa's Sleigh a month ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9IlkYnx-34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9IlkYnx-34
- zydex 5y agoBut they're using traditional blades so obviously it can lift anything. Isn't the whole point of the original article that the motors work with DaVinci's screw rotor design, generating lift?
- suifbwish 5y agoI don’t understand why so many people find it difficult to imagine ancient people understanding something as finite as aerodynamic mathematics. Their understanding of all other maths was phenomenal. Newton didn’t invent Newtonian physics and he probably wasn’t even as savvy as some of the ancients were. There is far too much inductive reasoning in history and historically science.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- iamjackg 5y agoFrom the way you worded this, I was expecting them to use the chair and sleigh as propellers. What's special about OP is that the propeller design is unusual, proving that Leonardo wasn't that far off when he came up with the idea.
- tshaddox 5y agoYeah, those YouTube videos really just demonstrate that...airplanes can carry things.
- cobookman 5y agoThe report also shows it to have superior thrust to a traditional rotor for the same RPM. https://www.thedrive.com/content-b/message-editor%2F1643667998866-davinciscrewrotordrone.jpg?quality=60 https://www.thedrive.com/content-b/message-editor%2F16436679...
- dr_orpheus 5y agoAlthough a better metric might be to look at the thrust to motor power and get an idea of its efficiency relative to traditional rotors. I can put larger blades on the motor and will get more thrust at the same RPM but the motors will have to work harder to push those blades.
- dTal 5y agoIndeed, the screw shape is essentially a large number of rotor blades, welded leading edge to trailing edge. Undoubtedly it produces more thrust for a given RPM, and undoubtedly the efficiency is horrifically bad.
- adolph 5y agoIs the efficiency the number of amps required to gain/maintain a particular rotational speed? So given rotational speed 4k conventional is 50g thrust and DaVinci 75ish g, if conventional costs 10amp then DaVinci would be less efficient if it uses more than 15 amps?
- wolpoli 5y agoAnd this is a video of Flitetest flying a circle plane. I doubt it's very efficient but it still flies with the help of their powerful motors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP9PizYicxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP9PizYicxY
- pengaru 5y ago> Anything can fly if you slap modern 7K RPM BLDC hobby motors on it. Is 7K RPM supposed to be an impressively high number?
- mlac 5y agoIt’s ~10,052,473 times faster than the earth spins, so it’s got that going for it.
- pengaru 5y agoAnd it's the same speed the iron 4-cyl ICE in my shitbox redlines... 7K strikes me as an exceptionally slow hobbyist scale electric motor, not the kind of thing I'd point out as capable of making anything fly.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoJust because a motor can sit on your desk and turn at 7k rpm doesn't mean it can pull a flying chair off the ground
- xwdv 5y agoWhat is the maximum possible RPM of something if it could spin at the speed of light? Shockingly low.
- dekhn 5y agoNo, but the real point is that the power to weight ratios of hobby BLDCs have absolutely gone crazy over the past 2 decades. Lots of work put into their power efficiency to maximize flight time on batteries.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoI never thought the day would come that I would type the words "I am very excited by that Ikea chair"
- roughly 5y ago> Anything can fly if you slap modern 7K RPM BLDC hobby motors on it. "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1925 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1925)
- jacquesm 5y agoExcept that this is absolutely nothing like that.
- annoyingnoob 5y agoOne has to wonder if DaVinci had his own model. https://instructional-resources.physics.uiowa.edu/demos/10c1020-propeller-stick-hand-helicopter https://instructional-resources.physics.uiowa.edu/demos/10c1...
- mihaic 5y agoDoes anyone know how old the toys that launched a propeller from a stick-spiral are? I used to play around with these as a kid, and was fascinated how low tech they could be and still fly.
- Wingman4l7 5y agoPretty old -- the Wrights played with something similar as children: https://www.wyso.org/news/2017-12-25/the-toys-of-orville-wright https://www.wyso.org/news/2017-12-25/the-toys-of-orville-wri...
- novosel 5y agoWright brothers were also quoted saying that they can make this table fly (the table where the interview was taking place at) if they could have a powerful enough motor at hand. This was, of course, after the first man flight was achieved.
- hnbad 5y agoCan I just point out how jarring it is to read "pretty old" followed by a mention of the Wright brothers, the last of whom died in 1948.
- Wingman4l7 5y agoPerhaps yes, but they were children over a century ago (and I strongly suspected these sorts of toys predated their time, anyway).
- dhosek 5y agoThat's the great span thing going on there. The house where my parents live has always been in my family had as its original residents my father, my aunt, my grandmother and my great-great-grandmother (yes, that's the number of correct greats there). The last of these was born before the establishment of the Austro-Hungarian empire in what's now the Czech Republic and was at the time the Austrian Empire. Family history in the old country is a bit murky so I don't have any dates for her ancestors, but she would have known people who lived under the Holy Roman Empire.
- JamesUtah07 5y agoThat is so wild
- Hokusai 5y agoThat is just a Archimedes' screw. Well known way before DaVinci. It's cool that DaVinci got to the conclusion that if moves water it can move air, thou. There original design used materials from the time, but with an enough powerful engine you can probably make it fly.
- andrewla 5y agoI don't think this is true. Archimedes screw is a similarly shaped helix but contained or partially contained in a tube so that it can move substances by rotary action. Using a helix as a simple machine is an old concept and probably predates writing; that's about as much of a common ancestor as they share.
- dtgriscom 5y agoAgreed. Archimedes' screw depends on gravity pulling the water to one side of the mechanism; it can't work vertically.
- jjeaff 5y agoArchimedes screw, that's just a wedge invented by cavemen. Archimedes just had the idea to wrap it around a post.
- tintor 5y agoMicroprocessor, that's just melted sand with a little bit of lightning inside.
- masswerk 5y agoFun fact: Historically, these air screws came from China and were sold as child toys on markets in Venice as early as in the 1200s. (This is probably also, where DaVinci picked up the idea.)
- BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y agoThe embedded fun fact here is that by the 13th century China was already exporting small goods like children's toys to Europe! til my knowledge of trade doesn't go any deeper or further back than "Marco Polo traded some things some time ago".
- pasabagi 5y agoThey had deep enough trade links that some refugee sassanid princes ended up being absorbed into the chinese nobility after the muslim consquest of persia.
- dekhn 5y agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages
- prox 5y agoI think there was a lot more trading than we usually think. It was an industry to trade for some states, and at one point in Europe they wanted to start trading directly, independent of political going-ons in the middle east. Starting the voyages of discovery. The Levant was immensely prosperous afaik. There is also the statue of a Buddha found in Sweden! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helgö#Excavations_at_Helgo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helgö#Excavations_at_Helgo
- 323454 5y agoThere is also what is thought to be a Buddha found at Oseberg which may have been produced in England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseberg_Ship
- adolph 5y agoFrom presentation at 9th Annual Electric VTOL Symposium [0]: Revolutionary Flight Vehicle Based on Leonardo da Vinci Aerial Screw: A Paradigm Shift in VTOL Technology Austin Prete, Vengalattore Nagaraj, Inderjit Chopra, Univ. of Maryland The team is from Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center Department of Aerospace Engineering University of Maryland. The PDF below [1] is very detailed and comes from a design competition there [2]. 0. https://vtol.org/events/2022-transformative-vertical-flight https://vtol.org/events/2022-transformative-vertical-flight 1. http://vfs.umd.edu/assets/downloads/2020_elico.pdf http://vfs.umd.edu/assets/downloads/2020_elico.pdf 2. http://vfs.umd.edu/designGrad.html http://vfs.umd.edu/designGrad.html
- carabiner 5y agoI'm actual size!
- sounds 5y agoHere's a direct link to the video: https://vimeo.com/672877397 https://vimeo.com/672877397 (The article is completely choked with overlapping autoplaying video ads.)
- hollander 5y agoThis looks more like a proper airship, like the ones from fifties and sixties scifi books.
- zw123456 5y agoOK, this is not reddit, but... indulge me Archimedes, Da Vinci and Einstein walked into a bar... Come on, it's Friday, we are having fun, give me your best punch line :)
- zw123456 5y agoaahhhh, Down voting me for tryig to have fun... ahhhh, Loging out for the next 3 months, HN on time out..