The MIT Lincoln lab has produced some new devices for aircraft and drones that make some impressive efficiency gains and are radically quieter. “The

MIT's latest drone propellers are very quiet and efficient

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2023-01-30 23:00:10

The MIT Lincoln lab has produced some new devices for aircraft and drones that make some impressive efficiency gains and are radically quieter.

“The toroidal propeller allows a small multirotor unpiloted aircraft, or drone, to operate more quietly than current drones that use propeller forms unchanged since the beginning of aviation,” said a statement by the lab.

“By enabling a drone that is less of an acoustic annoyance, this propeller may accelerate the acceptance of such aircraft for a wide range of uses—for example, aerial deliveries, cinematography, industrial or infrastructure inspections, and agricultural monitoring.”

The quiet toroidal propeller consists of two blades looping together so that the tip of one blade curves back into the other. This closed-form structure reduces and controls the drag effects of swirling air tunnels (i.e., vortices) created at the blades' tips and strengthens the propeller's overall stiffness. As such, the propeller’s acoustic signature is significantly decreased without affecting its performance.

This has been proven by tests of prototype toroidal propellers on commercial quadcopters that indicated thrust levels comparable to those of conventional propellers at similar power levels. The resulting reduced sound levels allowed toroidal-propeller-equipped drones to function without affecting human hearing at distances half of those encountered in typical operations.

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