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posted by martyb on Tuesday April 14 2020, @03:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the flappy-burred dept.

New Atlas:

What's wrong with the prop-powered, drone-style VTOL flying car designs we're seeing all over the place? Ignoring the energy density issues that are holding the entire electric aviation industry back, multirotors are quite noisy, and they have basically no adequate safety systems in place if the power systems fail.

A somewhat mysterious startup called Volerian claims to have a solution for both these points, and it uses a very odd propulsion system we've never run across before.

The system places a large number of flapping wings inside a series of precisely shaped ducts. The wings are driven by cams on a rotating shaft, such that they flap back and forth quickly between the walls of these ducts, much like the tails of fish. A second fixed "stator" wing is mounted further down the ducts "to further increase efficiency," presumably by messing with the swirling pressure vortices created by the flapping wings.

The company claims its furious flappers not only make less noise than a comparable multirotor setup, but that the system is safer as well. In the event of power loss, the wings can be released to flutter against the airstream coming up through the bottom of the vents as the aircraft falls, acting a bit like a parachute. Not to mention, there's no rotating decapitators in the system to worry about.

New Atlas's current issue highlights half a dozen startups that are hoping to make air taxis a reality.


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  • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday April 14 2020, @07:52PM (1 child)

    by MostCynical (2589) on Tuesday April 14 2020, @07:52PM (#982740) Journal

    which orientation will generate thrust? which will generate lift? if you're using a wing for lift, it won't hover. None of the drawings has a horizontal wing.. so

    The models show lift from a blade moving with a blade behind it fixed.

    none of the renders show the two blades (moving/fixed pair), so there is no link (other than being in the same promo material) between the model and the drawing.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday April 14 2020, @09:14PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday April 14 2020, @09:14PM (#982777)

    Look more carefully at the renders. For the big "plate" one at the top of the article, you have long fixed plates attached to the horizontal struts, with the shorter stationary "wings" attached at the bottom,
    and less clearly fastened "flappers" at the top. It's a sandwich of wide downward-pointing versions of the single right-facing system in the fluid dynamics simulation.

    Also, I just realized clicking the image actually brings up a whole lot of renders from different directions, some of which make what's going on a lot more obvious.

    > if you're using a wing for lift, it won't hover.
    Sure - and as you point out there are no horizontal wings (at least in the first image, there are several renders that do, including the image near the bottom of the page), so the thrust has to be directed downward to keep it from falling out of the sky. This is clearly a system to generate *thrust*, not lift. The fact that the "wings" (I think that's not actually the right word given how they seem to function) are encased within a larger structure should make that clear - lift doesn't work so well when you're immediately bouncing all that redirected air that generated lift off another surface attached to your aircraft, canceling out the forces.