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.

Carrier based aircraft have to spend time parked on the deck with salt spray surrounding them. Maintenance chiefs will apparently ask pilots to fly through rain, whenever possible, in order to reduce the potential for corrosion damage.

Most modern aircraft carriers generate a lot of steam, some of which is used to power the launch catapults for their aircraft.

Today’s invention is an adaptation to the steam catapult apparatus, whereby, when not engaged in combat operations, jets of steam can be directed at the fuselage and undercarriage of a plane for say ten seconds, as it lines up for takeoff.

This steam cleaning will greatly reduce the concentration of salt in all the aircraft’s recesses and preserve its working life.

I hate losing things down the backs of settees.

More than that, I dislike feeling around down there in search of lost items (and usually discovering mummified popcorn, or sultanas, instead).

Today’s invention is a simple fabric channel (green), which forms a continuous membrane, so that lost items must be caught by it, rather than descend beyond sight.

The membrane would be zipped in place (white), allowing the usual seat cover washing.

The geometry of the channel could be made with a slope from back to front of the settee, so that items would have a tendency to shuffle forwards before emerging onto the floor.

This shape, discovered by Dan Romik, is believed to be the largest (rigid) one that can move along a series of right-angled bends (in either left or right directions).

Although the double ended ‘sofa’ doesn’t contact every part of the walls’ surface, it would form an effective, low friction plug in an ultra low Reynold’s number flow regime.

Imagine a network of microfluidic channels engraved on a microchip. The channels carry fluids or tiny particles interspersed with accurately timed injections of Romik sofas.

This would allow stable packets of fluid to be moved around within rectilinear grids so that reactants between sofas could be delivered with great precision (or logic gates formed by interactions of streams).

The sofas, which would help keep flow channels clean by wiping (like a pipeline ‘pig’), could later be filtered out and reused.

I hate the idea of eating crab. It is an important foodstuff, though.

The cables for offshore renewable energy emit an electromagnetic field that attracts crabs and causes them to stay where they are.

Today’s invention exploits this finding.

Sections of cable (blue) would be designed to be smooth over say a 50m length.

A slider (red) around the cable knocks crabs off into a net (white) which is periodically raised to the surface.

This also limits the numbers of crabs caught, so that they are not over exploited.

Today’s invention is a new form of ejector seat.

A jet pilot has a canopy, attached to his/her seat, which is an aerofoil in section.

When needing to eject, the canopy is raised by say 30cm above the pilot’s head.

Airflow alone grabs the canopy and lifts it, and the pilot, clear of the fuselage…without any dangerous pyrotechnics and associated high g forces.

Then a parachute deploys in the usual way.

Today’s invention is a new form of helicopter rotor.

A horizontal carbon fibre torus (yellow) contains a number of carts which run on its interior surface. Each cart is attached to a rotor blade (white).

The blades are joined to a central ring which is a commutator like, circular electrical connection (blue). This passes electricity from the motor down wires to power a motor in each cart.

The carts drive the rotor blades, but with zero reaction torque on the body of the aircraft.

This does away with the need for any kind of torque-compensating rear rotor.

The aircraft might carry a battery or be powered by a jet turbine/generator combination.

A helicopter might have several such rotors, offering extra safety via redundancy.