I was working on another program developing ionic propulsion for for fixed wing aircraft
Um so basically able to fly without any moving parts and more importantly
to fly very, very quietly. I needed some way to compare that technology to a propeller
But propellers as we all know, are pretty loud
there are different ways to make them quieter and we can look again to wings to see how that works back when people were coming
up with all kinds of crazy ideas for airplanes in the early 1900s
And during World war two, there are a couple of designs that were basically these ring wings. So I There
II, if you took a ring wing and turned something like that into a propeller
We came up with this, this initial concept of using this to royal shape
this annular wing shape to make hopefully a quieter propeller. So I had an intern of mine who was just absolutely phenomenal run with the
idea where he took the concept and created a bunch of iterations using three D printers in our technology office Innovation Laboratory to try out
basically different shapes and see you know what works, what doesn't. And then from there figuring out what are the things that are making that's
making this propeller quieter. Uh The key thing that we thought was making the killer quarters
the fact that you're now distributing the vortices that are being generated by the propeller across the whole shape of it instead of just at
the tip, which then makes it effectively dissipate faster in the atmosphere that that tip vortex doesn't propagate as far
So you're less likely to hear it Game. The R&D 100 award was
was a little surreal. We all have this sense that, you know, the things we're working on could potentially have some greater impact for our
work with the torpedo propeller. You know, quieter drones has utility, not just in uh military applications that has utility and civilian applications as well
Now that we have Things flying closer to people and there are all these potential use cases
it's being revisited and our group came up with the Toronto Propellers one way to address that
There are others looking at
100. And it's just exciting to see the attention that's being brought to this particular problem by the committee for the R R&D award