Project team: Stephen Cheng, Karen Chow, Nathan Dell’Orto, Precious Listana, Timothy Schoepp
Course: Bioinspired Design, spring 2017
HeliHoot aims to apply the natural design of owl wings to reducing the noise levels caused by drones and, in turn, mitigating the side effects of drone noise when used for wildlife observation. As part of Bioinspired Design, a lower-division integrative biology course, the project team studied research on owl wings, drawing from these insights to prototype the concept for HeliHoot.
Owls achieve silent flight in part as a result of their serrations, found on both the forward (“leading edge comb”) and rear-facing edges (“trailing edge fringe”) of their wings, which break up the air that passes over and past the wings. The HeliHoot team applied these features to their concept for a drone rotor design, which adopts a similarly serrated structure along its edges to allow for more silent flight.
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