This Genius Propeller Will Change Aviation Forever

toroidal propellers have been making headlines online recently and I can understand why by using this donut-shaped Taurus blade design companies and research groups have shown benefits for both boats and drones by increasing efficiency and power whilst also reducing noise so in this video we're going to look at the toroidal blade design in some more detail and see how it can be applied to other systems like planes and wind turbines thank you as a quick recap from my other video on toroidal propellers their key benefits are that unlike normal propellers which create vortices at the tip of the blades they disperse the vortices across the whole Blade the effect of this is easier to see underwater where there are almost no bubbles known as cavitation coming off of the blade tips the reduction in cavitation and tip vortices are key reasons why the propellers are quieter and more efficient there are also benefits from the fact the toroidal propellers bring in fluid from further away which helps boost thrust you can see this by the die from further away being drawn into the jet stream following that brief recap I want to look at some additional information on the creation of the toroidal propeller design a commenter on the last video called Alistair actually pointed me towards a patent from a man called David B sugden back in 1969. in this patent the design of a toroidal propeller is clearly shown and and mentions the applications for vehicles and pumps Aleister mentioned how this was unable to reach commercial viability because of the difficulties manufacturing the blades at the time clearly David B sugden was too ahead of his time as the patent expired around 20 years later going through patents is actually what led me to finding this first interesting application of the toroidal propeller design or should I say the Box propeller design as it is otherwise known this patent from 2011 shows a double toroidal propeller that is designed specifically for aircraft propulsion and includes this interesting diagram showing how the propellers would be mounted on a turboprop plane building on its work a PhD student called Alexandre in Sweden studied this plane propeller and started to optimize it even further Alexandre found better aerodynamic performance and less noise when compared to a conventional propeller with the same number of blades but he mentioned it was harder to design and optimize than the conventional propeller that being said after seeing some of the designs for this box propeller I would love to see it in action on a full-sized or model aircraft on the topic of planes I think it is also worth mentioning annular Wing planes These Wings use the same concept as the toroidal propellers which is to reduce drag by reducing the tip vortices however these are not common on planes now for a number of reasons these include their structural complexity poor ability to store Fuel and control issues the idea did however Inspire the commonly used winglets which help reduce tip vortices additionally a new variation of these called the spiroid winglets are being designed which have a familiar look to the toroidal propellers these are still under development but it is reported that these may have some benefits over the standard winglets which are currently used when doing research for this video I always prefer to read scientific papers as they generally have less bias unlike mainstream news sites which are purposefully biased and divisive to grab your attention but now thanks to grounded news you can help break yourself out of the biased news bubble ground news is a website an app that lets you compare how breaking news is being covered by thousands of Publications worldwide with ground news you can quickly see the ownership factuality and political bias of each publication ground news is on a mission to hold the media accountable and encourage readers to think freely adding context and transparency to every news story and helping to remove reader blind spots you'll be able to compare headlines from different stories to see how news is being reported across the political Spectrum it also allows you to follow certain topics and breaking news based on specific people locations sources or themes as an example when I was reading about a new project to do with offshore wind energy I could quickly see the options of new sites from each political side or from different places in the world sign up for free at ground.news xeroth or by using the link in the description or subscribe for unlimited access to support their mission and thanks to ground news for supporting this video the next interesting application for the toroidal blade design is for wind turbines my favorite efforts for this have been from Robert Murray Smith here on YouTube Robert 3D printed a number of toroidal propeller designs and measured how they performed compared to Conventional wind turbine blades I will link his video below but overall he found no or Worse performance when using the toroidal blade design however this is possibly not too surprising as these propellers are designed to push a fluid not to be rotated by one this is the same reason a desk fan would be a poor design for a wind turbine so I would be interested to see how a toroidal blade specifically designed for a wind turbine would perform however all is not lost for improving wind turbine efficiency using new blade designs winglets like those on plane wings have been shown to improve the efficiency of wind turbines by over four percent by reducing the tip vortices it may even be possible to incorporate spyroid winglets like we saw earlier not only could winglets help the wind turbines they are on they could also help the wind turbines downwind by reducing the amount of turbulent air in their wake in one of his videos Robert makes a great point on why we can't expect huge improvements from One turbiden Design to the next this is because there is still the same amount of wind and therefore energy going through two turbines with the same swept area regardless of their designs and current wind turbines are actually already extremely efficient as they manage to get around 75 percent of the available wind energy this available energy is what remains after you account for the fact some of it has to be left in the wind so it doesn't stop at the back of the turbine another planned Apple application for the toroidal design to wind turbines can be seen in this paper from 1994. in this the application of a Taurus is used to help steady a floating offshore wind turbine from what I can see it appears that by Shifting the weight of the stabilization device away from the center the designers make the base harder to fall over for the same amount of overall Mass this is a concept called the moment of inertia this is the same reason a figure skater spins faster with their arms close to their body and slower when their arms are out the higher the moment of inertia the harder something is to rotate despite being an interesting concept this particular design was actually abandoned as it was too complex and expensive to make at the time but if we look at more recent floating wind turbine designs we can still see the idea of increasing the moment of inertia by moving the weight away from the center just with a more simple and cost effective design from what I've seen the toroidal blade designs seem to be most effective when used underwater this is why I would love to see more testing of them in pumps or hydro turbines I'm not sure how much benefit they would have if the propeller or turbine is already surrounded by a casing as this would already limit the tip vortices however if it can improve the efficiencies it would have significant impacts on energy generation and heat pumps where the pump efficiency is a key component in the overall system efficiency so let me know if you find anything related to this as it would make an interesting future video as you're still watching please subscribe to the channel as I think you'll enjoy the other videos that I make like this one on a new hydrogen Jet Engine That Could power the future of flight

Channel: Ziroth

Views: 487,630

Keywords: Science, Engineering, STEM, Electric, Zero, Tesla, News, Research, EV, Battery, wind, toroidal, propeller, planes

Id: 0e_msu-wS6k

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023