You tech and engineering students on sharenotes.com will really appreciate this post, it should be right up your alley. To build the better mouse trap has long been the motto of anyone seeking to improve technology ever since the act of invention began. And the proverbial “mousetrap” is everywhere. We concentrate on the most obvious thing like the ipod, the newest in a long line of portable music devices starting back with the “walkman”. However items in need of an upgrade are literally everywhere.
Take James Dyson’s newest invention for instance, the blade-less fan. The Air Multiplier as he calls it. It’s one of those “oh yeah!” kind of things where you don’t really feel that the fan MUST be improved, but when it comes along, it’s a welcome surprise. After his successful re-thinking of the standard vacuum cleaner, aptly named “Dyson”, he has moved on to how we cool ourselves.
I’m going to link you to a youtube video showing the device here so you can see it, however if you can imagine a very large ring (approx 16″ diamater) sitting on a pedestal base, that’s what it looks like. It’s very spartan and dare I say pretty? The Mac of fans if you will.
How it works (and I am grossly over simplifying things here) is by using an impeller in the base (think of a jet engine’s fan) that pulls air in, that sucks in the air and spits it out in a small opening along the back edge of the ring. The key according to Dyson is the shape of the surface of the ring that the air passes over. It works much like a wing of a plane, by curving and causing the air to move faster along it’s surface than it would be propelled simply by the machine. This not only accelerates the air, but it also creates an area of low pressure that forces the air coming through to want to fill that space causing the airflow to further accelerate.
What you are left with is a smooth and even flow of air (unlike traditional fans that chop the air with it’s blades) that can be finely tuned with the flow control knob. Set it to Oscillate and relax. The benefits of his design are many, the smooth controlled air aside, it’s beautiful, easy to clean, easy to store and completely safe especially around children with no accessible moving parts, much less chopping blades. The drawback as you might expect is the cost. It’s going to cost about $300… for a fan (check it out here. Sadly it will most likely be cost prohibitive initially for a great many of us (me included!).
While all this is very interesting, I decided to blog about it because the sharenotes.com users are studying a myriad of fields, and some of you are aspiring Engineers. The fact of the matter is, we’re always in need of some ingenuity and advancement. Whatever your specialty or field of study remember to keep an open mind and allow your creativity to flourish the better mouse trap is always going to be out there, somewhere.
Nicholas Fong, posted great collection of 