The genius and merit of the Lincoln MIT Laboratory (we are talking about the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology) consist in having put these two concepts together. Let’s take the boomerang, bend it until the two ends touch and use it as a propeller blade in order to add to the thrust linked to the inclination of the blade also the lift of the boomerang’s wing profile. This is how the experimentation on two-bladed rotors mounted on drones began, like the one in the figure below.ĭrone with toroidal propellers, source Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT News) Nothing complicated, therefore, and nothing new just as the boomerang is not new, which indeed seems to be the oldest flying object invented by man, with an origin set at around 13,000 years ago. Yes, you read right, before the pyramids and known history. The boomerang is a piece of wood in the shape of a right angle with the two sides shaped like a wing, which uses the rotation by drawing its energy to support itself and to turn, eventually returning to the starting point. The adjective “toroidal”, which actually means ring-shaped, seems chosen on purpose to evoke mysterious and incomprehensible geometries. Yet a toroidal helix can be made simply with a sheet of paper, scissors and a pin: many of us played with it as children, running with a stick to which it was fixed and making it spin in a whirlwind. It is called a pinwheel: the one in the figure has three blades, but they are made with four or more blades.
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