I think at one point or another (especially around this time of year) everyone has seen one of the seeds my article is about, slowly gyrating down from the tree tops, or picked up one of this funny looking little one sided wings and dropped it to watch it spin to the ground, but very few people would be able to explain how they work. The purpose of this spinning is to generate lift which is of course why they fall so slow which means more flight time which consequently means the same amount of breeze will disperse these little flying seeds over greater distances. The article is about the people who were recently researching maple seeds and what they learned.
They basically learned that the seeds generate lift almost exactly like a plane does, exploiting a wing shape that forces the air to move more quickly over the top of the wing than it does over the bottom. This causes a lower pressure to be on the top of the wing causing an upward force, generally called lift. The thing that made the seeds really interesting is that when they spin the shape of the seeds generates a vortex, causing the wind speed to be much, much faster generating way more lift. They hope to use this technology to make little itty-bitty Robo-copter, which is in my opinion pretty sweet.
here's a pretty cool clip of a man made bigger version, being spun fast enough that the lift over comes gravity and it flies (for a little bit anyway :] ) autogyrating choppa'
Pretty awesome that a "ground breaking" man made contribution to aviation (the airplane wing) has been around for millions of years in nature.
ReplyDeleteI think it is really cool that everything in nature is so adapted to the environment around it in order to survive and to create a future for the species. Those seeds seem so simple, yet they serve a big purpose in the future production of the maple trees. The seeds seem to have a life of thier own to be able to do this.
ReplyDeleteThose seeds have always seemed so simple yet I guess nature has its own engineering. Maybe we could adapt this technology to some of our planes/ helicopters. Cool post and video.
ReplyDeleteI forgot to mention that the way the seed creates vortices that generate lift, is more like a fighter jet than an airplane wing. Jets have a shape called a delta wing that creates a vortex that spins across the top of each wing, while wings on a normal airplane just make the air move faster.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments
That looks like Da Vinci's plan for a flying machine. Crazy old dude, but he had some legit stuff.
ReplyDeleteCool to see some engineering applied to nature. It's a huge advantage that allows this seed to reproduce over a much larger area. We should have reverse engineered this a long time ago :).
ReplyDeleteThat is pretty cool. I used to have one of those little toys shaped like a T that worked about the same way. You'd spin it in your palms and it would launch up in the air. Pretty amazing stuff.
ReplyDeletePretty interesting article. I find it amazing that nature has already figured out how to slow a seeds decent using the same principles that took humans several thousand years. Nature is the ultimate green engineer.
ReplyDeleteIt is a fascinating process in which I've been learning about in my Fluid Dynamics class and Engineering Lab. The Delta wing was created back in the 50's when supersonic flight was being explored. I've read other articles recently that are doing similar things, in that, engineers and scientists are looking to nature to recreate or mimick what has been long time mastered through nature. All part of a grand design.
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