Give then a Nobel Prize!
Why not use a rake? It exercises you and doesn’t pollute. Plus it can make you laugh if you see someone walk into it and gets slapped cartoon style in the face.
Neighbor’s tree dumps leaves all over my concrete patio, every week. Rake doesn’t work well on concrete, doesn’t fit in every crevice the leaves fall in around my yard, and also takes awhile. Leaf blower does the job in 5 minutes. If you’re faced with this problem, you’ll pick the leaf blower over using an awkward rake for 20 minutes every week.
Also, leaf blowers are now battery powered, so concerns about gasoline emissions are not as much of a factor.
Battery-powered silent leaf blowers. We really are in the future.
For the people not reading the article. This is not about gas leaf blowers.
The challenge was to take an electric leaf blower and make it even quieter.
This does nothing to address the lovely whirl of a 2 stroke.
Wat? I can’t hear you over the eeeeeeeEEEEEEEEeeEeeeEeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEUUMMbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Electric leafblowers exist. That problem is already solved.
Middlebrow dismissal. These are designed for electric blowers.
Whoever made that title should be launched into a volcano on the moon
what they did :
“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.
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.
Could use an even quieter compressed air gun
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.
wtf is shifting?
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.
Seems baffling
But you can’t deny it has a certain flow to it
Eeeeeeeeeeyyyyyy
Too bad these innovations wont make it down to the workers that stores hire from 11pm to 3am to clean the store parking lot across from me.
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.
Fuck leaf blowers. I don’t care if they’re quieter. The term here is “polishing a turd.” They son’t really solve any problems. They’re not good at removing debris, but just blowing it to a place where someone else will deal with it.
Also… removing debris on its own is a dubious pursuit, since “debris” could also be termed “stuff that holds moisture longer and slows the effect of drying soil during drought conditions.”
The gasoline powered blowers are also one of the worst polluting motors in common use.
I want you to think about how many leaf blowers are actually being used, and how many hours even the most inefficient small engine would have to run to compare to a single semi-truck route.
It’s so incredibly fucked how you people miss the forest for the trees.
Do you have any solid information to provide or are you just making vague allusions toward some unsubstantiated assumptions so you can justify to yourself being a judgmental ass?
It’s so incredibly fucked how “you people” are judgmental shits who are busy jerking yourself off every time you can “well ackshally” someone.
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So I promise I’m not trying to be a dick here. While what you’re saying is essentially reasonable, it’s actually not true.
The amount of emissions in these small, wildly inefficient engines is considerably worse than even a large pickup truck. The reason is because emissions standards, including the introduction of catalytic converters, etc. don’t apply to lawn equipment. The result is that these don’t actually burn fuel correctly, and spew out lots of harmful pollutants in a way that even large ICE vehicles don’t.
https://grist.org/technology/lawn-equipment-pollution-report/
Like sure, there are larger sources of emissions, but I’m kinda in favor of making changes that would offer a large benefit proportionate to the amount of lifestyle change needed to make the switch. As in, making this switch would be easier than not. These emissions produce no benefit to us, and they cost us a weird amount of money to produce.
So I promise I’m not trying to be a dick, but do you actually understand the results from the articles you posted?
A basic mass balance on the claims implies a very narrow interpretation of “emissions”. It doesn’t even pass the most basic sniff test, come on.
Not only do those articles completely ignore CO2, what about the energy required to manufacture and transport the fuel in the first place?
Those studies focus on NOx emissions, a very small subset of overall environmental impact. They basically cherry pick the fuck out of what consitutes as an “emission”, and ignores the massive difference in greenhouse gasses produced.
There are claims that running a leaf blower for 30 minutes produces as much “emissions” as driving a Raptor like 1 thousand miles.
Lmao, if you think a quarter gallon of gas from the leaf blower is “worse” than 100 gallons of fuel the truck would burn, you have to be mad.
Think about it for more than a couple seconds.
And even funnier about this, the solution for this shit is already here. Aside from commercial landscaping companies, electric is already taking over. Its basically a non-issue as far as realists are concerned.
Savage turnaround
Absolutely. And all those emissions are taking place very close to a human’s face.
The majority of use my leaf blower gets I blowing grass clippings from the street back into my lawn. It keeps cyclists safe and doesn’t make a mess on public travel ways. I think for that purpose they are a great solution.
Yeah the rakes don’t like it too much when you use them on the road too
A broom works fine for that.
Yeah, I use it to blow leaves off my walking path and into my flower/mulch beds. Prevents me from slipping and helps my plants
I actually see street cleaning teams here in Germany regularly where one person blows the dirt out from bike racks and from under parked cars and the other person sits in the big street sweeper to pick up the dirt. I think this is a very valid use for blowers. The blowers are electric, but I sure would.not mind them a bit more quiet.
Cool, do they offer whistle tips?
It’s that woo-woooooo
Can I get those STL files? I’m gonna print one for each of my neighbors
No, the university gets to license it and squeeze all the cash out first. Try again in 15 years.
🏴☠️
Dyson gets shit on frequently for being overpriced, but the audible analysis they do one some of their products is crazy complex. Some years ago I watched 30 minute video on the design they did for the hair dryer where they were designing minute angles in the fins of the air impeller, and using a PWM algorithm to measure backpressure in a feed back loop to spin up the fan where it wouldn’t create loud noise while also increasing the volume of air moved. They tuned the mechanisms specifically to shave off tiny peaks in oscilloscope readings.
One thing I remember is that they said they couldn’t entirely eliminate the specific annoying sound frequencies because it had to ramp, but what they did is ramp to right below the annoying sound frequency level, then hold, then burst above the annoying frequency band very quickly. So the operator of the unit doesn’t hear the annoying sound because the device shoots past it so fast.
I’ve never heard of any company be that picky and put so much effort into avoiding one negative experience of a product.
And then they go and make an idiotic bathroom hand air dryer that is vertical and unnatural to dip hands into and too small of an opening so as to be difficult to not touch it with your clean hands.
Haven’t these been shown to be literally the proverbial shit hitting the fan in terms of spreading bacterial matter everywhere?
Yes they literally pull in particles from the bathroom air and blow them directly on your hands.
Plus a good chunk of people only wash hands for show: the water runs for 1 sec it barely touches their fingertips, then go on to these dryers and whatever is on their hands flies out everywhere.
Maybe I’ve got small hands, but I’ve never had problems with them. I slightly cup my hands. At least it feels like they get dryer faster that way.
They released that original Airblade hand drying 18 years ago in 2006 way before the hair dryer.
11 years ago In 2013 they released the Airblade V which doesn’t do the vertical dip thing.
Well, I see the old one 99 times more often than the new one.
I’m talking about this piece of crap design.
Maybe it was just me but I never had issues with the u shaped dryers. Although I normally put my hands in by the side, wrists above, kept them flat, and drew out slowly. Dry hands every time.
Other dryers just end up pushing water to the dry side of your hand.
They also really really work well, theyre over engineered like crazy but last forever.
I have to run out of the bathroom when my wife uses her Dyson air dryer because it hurts my ears, and you’re telling me this is by design?!
Wait until you find out the analysis they do on car door closing sounds and the clickiness of specific buttons! Industrial Design is COOOL.
Buying industrial buttons and modding old controllers isn’t really mainstream but damn it should be.
A NES controller with switches and joysticks normally used in a combine harvester is really satisfying.
Haha no that’s not what I meant. Industrial Design is a profession and automotive industrial designers design all sorts of things, from the shape of the body to the swoopiness of a headlight to the specific clacky feel of various buttons.
All this tells me is that they have a great PR department.
Can’t wait to use this in Leaf Blower Revolution
“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”.
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.
Man. People will be negative about everything.
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.
…is this not just a muffler/silencer for leaf blowers? Good on these kids! This definitely falls under the ‘why didn’t I think of that!’ category for me.
it’s electric.
Which means it’s automatically 200x quieter than a two stroke.
Idk what else they did but im pretty sure it makes almost no difference lmao.
Good job not reading any part of the article and confidently announcing your completely incorrect take on things to everyone.
correct me if im wrong here, but gas leaf blowers are inherently many times louder than electric leaf blowers to begin with. Calculating the near field DB levels doesn’t really count here since most of the annoyance is actually going to be from other people who have to listen to it running.
And since electric leaf blowers often have a much higher pitch, that pitch attenuates at a much greater rate, especially compared to that of an ICE meaning that it’s often silent, if not very quiet, at the same distance that an ICE would be rather loud at.
Also, in my defense 90% of articles these days are not worth reading, i’m sure they probably did something as i literally mentioned in my previous comment, but like i said, comparing this to a traditional ICE leaf blower (which people seem to fucking love for some reason) in comparison i’m still pretty confident that this would make almost zero fucking difference, since the vast majority of noise coming from an ICE blower is not air noise, but engine noise.
But yes thank you for telling me that i’m wrong and bad for not reading an article about an item that has probably 20-30% market share from my anecdotal experience.
And since electric leaf blowers often have a much higher pitch, that pitch attenuates at a much greater rate
As the article states, it’s this sound that they got rid of. A 94% drop in the high pitched shrill of the electric leaf blower.
Read. The. Article.
It’s a 2 minute read ffs.
i am aptly aware of this, in fact i’m aware of the fact that it’s actually a 12db drop in volume. Someone else kindly told me what was in the article.
But my primary point is still true.
and in defense of myself, most articles are bullshit anyway. 50% of it is filler, and 20% of it is useless information, edu sites are generally better, but there’s no guarantee, and i don’t bother with most articles these days. And my problem here isn’t even the fact that they did drop the volume of the noise, my problem is that i’m not sure this is a significant accomplishment.
There are a lot of fields actively researching this exact same concept.
So you’re not here to read articles ever? You’re just here to get corrected in comments?
i’m not here to read articles most of the time, because people talk about what’s in the article here. And in this case, leaf blowers, specifically electric ones are a bit quieter in near field operations.
Which i definitely expected, based off of the headline, but like i said, compared to a traditional ICE leaf blower, especially commercial backpack setups. Does it make a difference? Uhm. Not sure.
It’s funny to me that people yell at me about not reading articles, even though i understand the general pretense of it, without reading it. People literally corrected me by stating numbers, because that was the only thing i didn’t mention, since i didn’t read the article. And i didn’t even come here to speak about it, i mostly came here to complain about the fact that small ICE engines exist on lawn equipment.
I’m completely uneducated in this field, but there’s a 2 min video attached to that page that demonstrates before and after. Sure sounded better to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
i’m not educated in the field specifically, but what i do have a knowledge base of is the fact that this probably isn’t a technical W for the leaf blower industry, especially judging that most commercial leaf blowers are gas ICE based equipment, and that even with the home market being more accessible than ever, a lot of home owners still use ICE based equipment.
Put together with the fact that the high pitch whine attenuates aggressively at distance, compared to much lower pitches. It’s likely that it has little benefit for anybody other than the user, in which case, hearing protection.
I’m sure this is a more broad accomplishment, but this has been a field of study across multiple industries for multiple reasons.
Cue right wingers protesting the new “woke” leaf blowers.
I’ll let my gas powered leaf blower running all day now to make your woke blower useless. Get owned, sucker
Blowing coal lel
There certainly are plenty of people who use those things because they enjoy being obnoxious twats.
The same kind of morons rolling coal and destroying their engines.
I instantly imagined someone rolling coal with their leaf blower… you know it’s going to happen, even if they’re not diesel.
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.
I use things that work
Blowing leaves around instead of removing it, isn’t ideal then.
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.
No, that’s what a rake does.
Everyone I see using them merely uses it to blow the detritus into the street. What you’re saying makes a lot of sense, but people don’t do that
Do you think a leaf BLOWER sucks leaves up or does anything but blow them wherever you point the machine?
Your thinking of a leaf vacuum which the article is NOT referring too…
What was the point of your reply, I really don’t get it…
Yeah, I figure that’s the kind of thing they’re going to say.
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.
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.
Modern day crap though? Oh I’m with you!
Maybe the garbage brands. Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, etc are very well made, and significantly more powerful than they were 5-10 years ago.
This is very true. I just know my neighbour wouldn’t choose a quieter option if he had the chance
Seeing how some very particular relatives are, I wonder if much of the gas leaf blower cloud 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”.
Cue the left-wingers being rage-baited about the right wingers protesting the new “woke” leaf blowers.
All the while the leaf blower manufacturer is getting free publicity.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Coming soon: The all new, all American, COAL powered leaf blower.
Now with a slide whistle and megaphone attachments for extra annoying noises.
Whistle goes, “Woo, woo,” but that’s only in the mo’ning.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
pasta powered leaf blower
No, they’ve moved on to “DEI” as their racist dogwhistle now. Keep up.
“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!”
