Michael Chacon, Madison Morrison, Andrew Palacio, and Leen Alfaoury – credit WILL KIRK JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

Engineering students at Johns Hopkins have created a silencer module for the campus leaf blowers, reducing the overall noise pollution of the devices by 37%, while they succeeded in almost completely removing the high-pitched whining that annoyed them the most.

The design is patent-pending and Stanley Black & Decker, who sponsored the students, expects to be selling them in two years.

It's not uncommon for leaf blowers to be banned by homeowners associations or following apartment tenant protests—their endless, up-and-down caterwauling of various frequencies is the delight of no one, and worse, landscapers often use them in the early morning to avoid the heat of the day.

“The sound that comes out of this leaf blower is very complicated and it contains a lot of different frequencies,” said team member Andrew Palacio. “A lot of different notes on a piano would be a good analogy.”

At the moment, the Johns Hopkins campus uses battery-powered leaf blowers which are already quieter than gasoline-powered ones. Since last September, Palacio and his team members Michael Chacon, Leen Alfaoury, and Madison Morrison have been examining the devices in depth—how many sounds are there, and what is causing them.

Overall they workshopped more than 40 versions of a leaf blower silencer. Many of them worked but diminished the power of the air coming out. They eventually came up with an easy-to-secure suppressor that functions much like the ones fitted to firearms.

MARKET-READY INVENTIONS: Alaskan Inventor is 3D Printing Tidal Power Generators for Houseboats: Just Drop Anchor and Power On

“Our product takes in a full blow of air and separates it,” Alfaoury told Johns Hopkins. “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.”

“It ultimately dampens the sound as it leaves, but it keeps all that force, which is the beauty of it,” adds Chacon.

MORE GREAT INVENTIONS: Indian Engineers Tackle Water Shortages with Star Wars Tech in Kerala

It's one thing to come up trumps in a class project, but this invention isn't designed to win them any science fairs, but rather for going on the shelves of Home Depot or Lowe's.

“It's not just some cool theoretical thing that will sit on a shelf and never be heard from again—this is ready to be mass manufactured,” said Nate Greene, senior product manager at Stanley Black & Decker, who graduated from Johns Hopkins in 2017 with an engineering degree. “This is a really rare and dramatic level of success.”

WATCH the story below from JH University Press…

SHARE These Intrepid Inventors And Their Noise Cancelling Device… 

Source link