The Toroidal Propeller — A Quiet, Closed-Form Drone Propeller Design

The toroidal propeller allows a small multirotor unpiloted aircraft, or drone, to operate more quietly than current drones. 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 — learn what kind in this video.

Transcript

00:00:04 hi my name is Tommy Sebastian I'm a member of the senior technical staff at MIT Lincoln laboratory and today I'm going to talk to you about the toroidal propeller I was working on another program developing ionic propulsion for for fixed-wing aircraft so basically able to fly without any moving parts and more importantly to fly very very quietly I

00:00:25 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 II there were a couple of designs that were basically

00:00:50 these ring wings so I wondered what would it look like if you took a ring wing and turned something like that into a propeller we came up with this this initial concept of using uh this toroidal 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

00:01:14 concept and created a bunch of iterations using 3D 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 filler Fighters the fact that you're now

00:01:37 Distributing the the vortices they're being generated by the propeller across the whole shape of it instead of just at the tip which then makes it you know effectively dissipate faster in the atmosphere that tip Vortex doesn't propagate as far so you're less likely to hear it getting the r d 100 award was was a little surreal we all have this sense that you know the things we're

00:02:01 working on could potentially have some greater impact for our work with the toroidal propeller you know quieter drones has utility not just in uh military applications it 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 you know our group came up with the toroidal

00:02:23 propellers one way to address that there are others looking at it too and it's just exciting to see the attention that's being brought to this particular Problem by the uh by the committee for the r d 100 award