I’ve always been fascinated by how birds take flight and how that might be possible for a human.
Today’s invention is a new form of ornithopter.
The general idea is that after the wing has transferred downwards momentum to a large mass of air, it needs to reach forward and grab the next wingful both quickly and with minimal drag. In this way a bird can make rapid, net progress upwards, because it’s ascending more than descending.
In the present design (top image), the power stroke is just as might be expected, with the wing ‘flapping’ downwards (white cube moves into the screen via powered rotation around the axis marked in red).
Once this 180 degree flap is complete (note the new position of the white cube), however, the (symmetrical) wing is retracted upwards (red arrow) in a powered translation (perhaps driven by energy stored in a spring or using the rack and pinions shown). This gets the wing ready for the next downstroke very quickly and without causing all the turbulence and structural stress that previous ornithopters have suffered from. There are no complicated joint rotations here, as birds seem to manage.
After the system is in the air, it’s free to flap much less and to glide and soar to conserve energy.
This offers the possibility of using a number of these wing units arranged say in a circle, providing both redundancy and less noise in flight than other such systems.
