"Our product takes in a full blow of air and separates it," said team member Leen Alfaoury. "Some of that air comes out as it is, and part of it comes out shifted. The combination of these two sections of the air makes the blower less noisy."
Adds Chacon: "It ultimately dampens the sound as it leaves, but it keeps all that force, which is the beauty of it."
Their design cuts the most shrill and annoying frequencies by about 12 decibels, which all but removes them, making them 94% quieter.
The wording is comically awkward and imprecise. But if I had to guess, they figured out a way to fiddle with how the air is routed through the secondary portion such that the emitted noise is phase-shifted to cancel out the frequencies they’re targeting.
I wonder if that shares the same physics as silvent's compressed air guns.
Silvent’s air nozzles reduce the sound level when blowing with compressed air compared to blowing through open pipes. This is due in part to the reduction in noisy turbulence from using Silvent’s air nozzles, and also because of the nozzles’ special design. Silvent’s air nozzles pass the compressed air through small holes and slots, which raises the sound to frequencies beyond what the human ear can perceive. This allows us to make blowing with compressed air both quiet and efficient.
No, not the same ... in your paragraph you describe an increase of the frequency at a level human hearing do not perceive while the other made cancellation of a given frequency using phase shifting and recombination.
Dyson gets shit on frequently for being overpriced, but the audible analysis they do one some of their products is crazy complex. Some years ago I watched 30 minute video on the design they did for the hair dryer where they were designing minute angles in the fins of the air impeller, and using a PWM algorithm to measure backpressure in a feed back loop to spin up the fan where it wouldn't create loud noise while also increasing the volume of air moved. They tuned the mechanisms specifically to shave off tiny peaks in oscilloscope readings.
One thing I remember is that they said they couldn't entirely eliminate the specific annoying sound frequencies because it had to ramp, but what they did is ramp to right below the annoying sound frequency level, then hold, then burst above the annoying frequency band very quickly. So the operator of the unit doesn't hear the annoying sound because the device shoots past it so fast.
I've never heard of any company be that picky and put so much effort into avoiding one negative experience of a product.
And then they go and make an idiotic bathroom hand air dryer that is vertical and unnatural to dip hands into and too small of an opening so as to be difficult to not touch it with your clean hands.
Maybe it was just me but I never had issues with the u shaped dryers. Although I normally put my hands in by the side, wrists above, kept them flat, and drew out slowly. Dry hands every time.
Other dryers just end up pushing water to the dry side of your hand.
Plus a good chunk of people only wash hands for show: the water runs for 1 sec it barely touches their fingertips, then go on to these dryers and whatever is on their hands flies out everywhere.
Haha no that’s not what I meant. Industrial Design is a profession and automotive industrial designers design all sorts of things, from the shape of the body to the swoopiness of a headlight to the specific clacky feel of various buttons.
Not necessarily for sound, on industrial fans and drives, we can program in skip frequencies to avoid any resonance issues in the system. I've never done it for noise reduction. But I do some tweaks for efficiency and power consumption reduction. There's some wild industrial design stuff out there, and in the end, it's because it provides something the customer wants. I won't go into specifics, but you can design the same components the same for multiple manufacturers and do some slightly different things in its construction to give the vibe the OEM wants, or to fix some inherent characteristics in the manufacturers platform. It's REALLY cool when you think about it. Sorry to be so vague, but I have to be.
this is pretty cool but it'd be cooler if the started supporting right to repair. As far as i can care they're cunts until they stop producing manufactured e-waste products.
It's almost like it's a requirement for every landscaping company to use the most noisy, ear destroying, gas-powered leaf blower that they can buy that can be heard from 2 city blocks over.
Gas powered is still vastly superior for things like leafblowers. A good gas one can last 15 years and take a total of $40 in maintenance parts for that entire time, all while blowing harder. High end battery powered ones will last 45 minutes and need a couple hundred dollars worth of replacement batteries every few years. My stihl from 1997 still works like it's new.
I actually own one of these but never use it because extension cords are such a pain in the ass especially if you need to stretch it all throughout the yard. I really only bought it because my dryer duct was clogged with 20 years worth of lint and this blew it right out.
Sure, if you need less power and want to deal with the extension cord, and where you're blowing is within 100 feet of an outlet. Doesn't work well for gutters or large properties or houses with only 1 or 2 outlets outside.
Huh. I can't think of 297 other uses for a leaf blower, so I guess your 99% claim might be a bit....overblown.
? Not high enough to keep leaves from plugging them up. I mean, I could technically get it done with a huge extension cord, but that would be a terrible pain in the ass.
"I'd never even heard of this 2 weeks ago, but after watching a single 90-second segment on Fox News, it's all I can talk about and clearly the reason why the country is failing!"
I use things that work (even if you find them loud or annoying) because typically over engineered things (like the 'quiet' leafblower) are most likely very problematic and will fail. I just do not trust anything new anymore. Companies did this and forced me to stop caring about 'innovation' with their constant lies and fraud.
Edit downvotes clearly from people who are pissed they have to replace their expensive appliances every 5-7 years because 'innovation'
No we obviously need more cheap plastics that will dry rot in your shed and shitty rubber grips that will turn to sticky goo in five years, as well as lowest bidder designed control circuitry with a dozen corners cut.
I get what you mean, modern power tools feel like Fisher Price toys. They're disposable.
What happened to the giant metal vacuum cleaners that doubled as a blunt-force weapons?
Hey, don't diss Fisher Price toys. The old ones from 40+ years ago were solid. So much so that the iconic telephone on wheels and with eyes is still around.
Leafblowers are used to collect it into a pile which is then raked/shoveled into a bin. The blower is much faster and less effort than the rake at collecting everything into the pile.
Although if there isn't that much, I suppose letting it dry and break down in the local environment is better than putting it in a landfill. If there's a lot of it, then at least in cities I've lived in, they can and do ticket for putting yard waste or shoveling snow in the street.
Seeing how some very particular relatives are, I wonder if much of the gas leaf blower crowd is less "watch me stick it to the libs" and more "look at me, I'm cleaning my yard, that makes me better than you"
And by "cleaning my yard" they really mean "blowing whatever I consider a mess onto whatever is beside my yard, or in the general vicinity for the dust".
I forgot that this device is still being used lol. Masovian Voivodeship in Poland banned leaf blowers in 2021 as part of air quality regulation and... air actually got cleaner and no one complains about leaves on sidewalks
Most gas-powered leaf blowers use two-cycle engines, which produce hundreds of times more hazardous pollutants and fine particulates than cars. Leaf blowers overtook automobiles as the number one source of air pollution in California during 2020.
I did want to kneecap the idiot that decided to use a leaf blower to blow the sand off the parking lot of the apartment I used to rent in. Was kind of tempted to send the manager a bill for a new clear coat on my car.
I don't mind the electric ones, but I had a neighbour that would fire up a two-stroke backpack monster at 6 AM any morning there was the barest skiff of snow. And he'd try for hours blowing heavier snow that he could have had shovelled in 15 minutes. He was generally just an asshole neighbour all around.
we had a thread a while ago, and some dude was in there insisting that blowers can be "used for snow" because apparently snow blowers don't fucking exist.
this is such a weird legal thing. Even if it's my sidewalk, you're still walking on it of your own accord, i'd get it if maybe like, i put ice all over it, or something. but otherwise that's not my problem.
The sad thing is the students who actually did the work will probably see no financial gain from this. Students pay to take a class and then a company pays the university for access to the students and the students ideas and work is used by a company with no financial benefit to the students. Everyone makes out except the students.
I worked at a UC and companies retained all IP across all UCs and my undergrad school from the east coast was the same way. I've never heard of a university that let students keep their IP. I would imagine it would be hard to attract outside companies since the companies pay to be a part of the program. Can you point to a university program that allows students to retain their IP for senior design projects? I know if a student is doing a project through the school for a different class like a lab and they invent something or are volunteering the university has no claim to it but senior design is different.
So it looks like for senior design classes the students don't have to be associated with projects where they lose their IP rights. But sponsors have the right to say a project will give all IP to the sponsor. I imagine how this works in practice is all external companies will require they retain IP then the professor creates additional projects where ip can be retained but these are usually canned projects solving some trivial problem that won't really allow the students to go anywhere interesting with the project. I am not saying that's the case but I remember at my undergrad and at the UC school that was the case.
Good thing is you could 3d print some and give them to them. If they use a compatible blower that is. Or if you're handy with modeling you could probably modify the attachment part.
....is this not just a muffler/silencer for leaf blowers? Good on these kids! This definitely falls under the 'why didn't I think of that!' category for me.
correct me if im wrong here, but gas leaf blowers are inherently many times louder than electric leaf blowers to begin with. Calculating the near field DB levels doesn't really count here since most of the annoyance is actually going to be from other people who have to listen to it running.
And since electric leaf blowers often have a much higher pitch, that pitch attenuates at a much greater rate, especially compared to that of an ICE meaning that it's often silent, if not very quiet, at the same distance that an ICE would be rather loud at.
Also, in my defense 90% of articles these days are not worth reading, i'm sure they probably did something as i literally mentioned in my previous comment, but like i said, comparing this to a traditional ICE leaf blower (which people seem to fucking love for some reason) in comparison i'm still pretty confident that this would make almost zero fucking difference, since the vast majority of noise coming from an ICE blower is not air noise, but engine noise.
But yes thank you for telling me that i'm wrong and bad for not reading an article about an item that has probably 20-30% market share from my anecdotal experience.
I'm completely uneducated in this field, but there's a 2 min video attached to that page that demonstrates before and after. Sure sounded better to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
i'm not educated in the field specifically, but what i do have a knowledge base of is the fact that this probably isn't a technical W for the leaf blower industry, especially judging that most commercial leaf blowers are gas ICE based equipment, and that even with the home market being more accessible than ever, a lot of home owners still use ICE based equipment.
Put together with the fact that the high pitch whine attenuates aggressively at distance, compared to much lower pitches. It's likely that it has little benefit for anybody other than the user, in which case, hearing protection.
I'm sure this is a more broad accomplishment, but this has been a field of study across multiple industries for multiple reasons.
i am aptly aware of this, in fact i'm aware of the fact that it's actually a 12db drop in volume. Someone else kindly told me what was in the article.
But my primary point is still true.
and in defense of myself, most articles are bullshit anyway. 50% of it is filler, and 20% of it is useless information, edu sites are generally better, but there's no guarantee, and i don't bother with most articles these days. And my problem here isn't even the fact that they did drop the volume of the noise, my problem is that i'm not sure this is a significant accomplishment.
There are a lot of fields actively researching this exact same concept.
i'm not here to read articles most of the time, because people talk about what's in the article here. And in this case, leaf blowers, specifically electric ones are a bit quieter in near field operations.
Which i definitely expected, based off of the headline, but like i said, compared to a traditional ICE leaf blower, especially commercial backpack setups. Does it make a difference? Uhm. Not sure.
It's funny to me that people yell at me about not reading articles, even though i understand the general pretense of it, without reading it. People literally corrected me by stating numbers, because that was the only thing i didn't mention, since i didn't read the article. And i didn't even come here to speak about it, i mostly came here to complain about the fact that small ICE engines exist on lawn equipment.
