"Patent pending" and already picked up by a major manufacturer. So what this means is basically while it could be a good thing... the article is basically an advertisement for an upcoming product.
Not nearly as good a thing until it gets copied/the patent gets worked around. Also, zero explanation of what was actually done to accomplish this, so again, leaning more towards "this is just advertisement with extra steps".
New breakthrough that may change the entire landscape of an industry? Oh, we hear about breakthroughs every few weeks. Call me if it actually makes it to market.
New apparently game changing breakthrough that's already being taken to market? Boo advertising, we should just quiet launch it and see if anyone notices? Seriously?
IMHO, the thing that’s being promoted here isn’t the leaf blower. It’s the university’s engineering program and the opportunities it’s providing for students.
I kind of doubt someone has this University blog post in their deck of Spring 2024 leaf blower marketing initiatives.
This is the kind of stuff that the people managing internships handle in a company. Companies do this for talent acquisition. They don’t even do it for the cheap labor, because coaching students usually gobbles up a lot of your IC’s time.
Good engineering and industrial design programs find opportunities for students to work with real companies on real products.
Back in the day I used to be the student that published stuff like this to our product design department’s website. The point wasn’t to demo tech or sell a product, it was to make the program look like something worth applying to and donating to.
If a brand was name dropped, it wasn’t because we wanted to sell their thing. It was because we wanted to let applicants and alumni know that we were offering real world experience with recognizable companies. It’s basically like a reverse internship. Department faculty finds companies to bring to the students, as opposed to students applying to companies.
"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".
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.
"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.
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.
