Learning from Toroidal Propellers
My fried Paul sent me a video of a new design for propeller blades based on a toroid that when used on boats reduces cavitation and when used on quadcopters, makes them much quieter. I had seen the video before but when Paul sent them to me, it transported me back to my undergrad studies in aerospace engineering.
I was taking a lab course and was struggling in that course as well as all others. In our lab group, we were tasked with experimenting on different shapes of propeller blades that could generate the most lift. The constant for the experiment was the power output from the motor and we were graded on the lift we produced. We were then left to our own means to get access to equipment.
Much of the work involved asking for favors from the chemistry students. They could sneak us into the lab with scales that could measure accurately in milligrams. Since it was before desktop 3D printing, we used elementary school materials like popsicle sticks, bamboo, and craft paper to carve, bend, and sand different shapes by hand. It was a mess and we performed fairly poorly.
I struggled with many of the other experiments in that course and after breaking many things, the instructor singled me out as the student who had “learned the most” and in my ignorance, I accepted that as a compliment. I’m still trying to figure out what I learned, but I think it was a resilience to errors, mistakes, and set backs. Oh, and the value of experimentation.
Going in deeper about how the “miracle” of toroidal propellers, it seems like there’s still a lot of value in empirical studies even in the mechanical world. We can use AI tools like GANS to experiment and optimize but there are still many aspects of the physical world that have not been accurately modeled and it can make a large impact to design physical experiments.
