Hearing is be-leafing: Students invent quieter leaf blower

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.

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.
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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Haven't these been shown to be literally the proverbial shit hitting the fan in terms of spreading bacterial matter everywhere?
- 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.
- That came way before the hair dryer, no?
All this tells me is that they have a great PR department.
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.
- Meanwhile, Subaru phoned it in with their window switches...
I have to run out of the bathroom when my wife uses her Dyson hair dryer because it hurts my ears, and you're telling me this is by design?!
They also really really work well, theyre over engineered like crazy but last forever.
- Newer ones don't. They're usually dead in 2-4 years.
- Maybe the old Dysons. The new ones are rubbish. Shark all the way.
this is pretty cool but it'd be cooler if the started supporting right to repair. As far as i can care they're cunts until they stop producing manufactured e-waste products.
Not necessarily for sound, on industrial fans and drives, we can program in skip frequencies to avoid any resonance issues in the system. I've never done it for noise reduction. But I do some tweaks for efficiency and power consumption reduction. There's some wild industrial design stuff out there, and in the end, it's because it provides something the customer wants. I won't go into specifics, but you can design the same components the same for multiple manufacturers and do some slightly different things in its construction to give the vibe the OEM wants, or to fix some inherent characteristics in the manufacturers platform. It's REALLY cool when you think about it. Sorry to be so vague, but I have to be.

It's almost like it's a requirement for every landscaping company to use the most noisy, ear destroying, gas-powered leaf blower that they can buy that can be heard from 2 city blocks over.

Especially gas-powered as they can then rev them all the time, raising the annoyance to completely new levels.
Probably. lol. You look out the window to see what's making all that racket, and you see their logo on their truck / shirts.
It’s advertising!
Gas powered is still vastly superior for things like leafblowers. A good gas one can last 15 years and take a total of $40 in maintenance parts for that entire time, all while blowing harder. High end battery powered ones will last 45 minutes and need a couple hundred dollars worth of replacement batteries every few years. My stihl from 1997 still works like it's new.
- Just one nitpick -- usually one can swap out batteries and continue to use the tool.
- For 99% of applications, a corded electric blower with an extension cord is far superior than every other option.

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
- There certainly are plenty of people who use those things because they enjoy being obnoxious twats.
- Blowing coal lel
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.
  
  https://youtu.be/zUXow3d3-b0?si=gr_4SDhNm3yUH0A6
- 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!"
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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://www.piped.video/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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.

I forgot that this device is still being used lol. Masovian Voivodeship in Poland banned leaf blowers in 2021 as part of air quality regulation and... air actually got cleaner and no one complains about leaves on sidewalks

https://samorzad.infor.pl/sektor/zadania/srodowisko/6408199,zakaz-uzywania-dmuchawy-do-lisci.html

I don't mind the electric ones, but I had a neighbour that would fire up a two-stroke backpack monster at 6 AM any morning there was the barest skiff of snow. And he'd try for hours blowing heavier snow that he could have had shovelled in 15 minutes. He was generally just an asshole neighbour all around.
- we had a thread a while ago, and some dude was in there insisting that blowers can be "used for snow" because apparently snow blowers don't fucking exist.
  
  People are fucking weird dude.
People forget brooms exist. Just like using a shovel during the winter.
You didn’t just start using electric ones?
- They probably weren't too concerned with the emissions from the leaf blowers themselves, but the dust and whatnot they whip up into the air.
The fucking DREAM.

The sad thing is the students who actually did the work will probably see no financial gain from this. Students pay to take a class and then a company pays the university for access to the students and the students ideas and work is used by a company with no financial benefit to the students. Everyone makes out except the students.

Actually unless they made it working for the university its normal for students to retain their IP rights.
- I worked at a UC and companies retained all IP across all UCs and my undergrad school from the east coast was the same way. I've never heard of a university that let students keep their IP. I would imagine it would be hard to attract outside companies since the companies pay to be a part of the program. Can you point to a university program that allows students to retain their IP for senior design projects? I know if a student is doing a project through the school for a different class like a lab and they invent something or are volunteering the university has no claim to it but senior design is different.
How come there are no student unions?
- Then they'd have to start paying student ath-a-leets. 😉
- There are graduate students unions or research assistant unions. Undergraduates (not ones working in a lab) don't work for the university they are customers. It would be like members of a gym unionizing. I guess it could happen maybe.

I invented a leaf blower that is 100% silent and is shaped like a rake.

Interesting, my rake makes some sounds when I use it. It’s pretty loud on hard surfaces.
Let me just rake up all this sand and grass clippings.
- Too bad there isn’t one shaped like a broom.
That's way too expensive. I just use my fingers.
- Can I borrow them to clean my yard? I promise I'll get them right back to you.

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.
- (10 hours of work later)
  
  "Ok how much money will this save me for the risk of your plastic thing melting all over my blower."

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.
- 🏴‍☠️
Here's the email of one of the students that were involved in the project. Try directly reaching out to them:

Madison Morrison: mmorr114@jh.edu

Mwap!

....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.

Whoever made that title should be launched into a volcano on the moon

Cool, do they offer whistle tips?

It's that woo-woooooo

Give then a Nobel Prize!

Now do the trimmers and the lawnmowers

What about hair dryers?
- Do them too!

It been brought by Black & Decker, no ?

It looks like it was sponsored by black and decker but the whole article looks like an ad for Dewalt...
- Black and Decker owns DeWalt.

Fuck leaf blowers. I don't care if they're quieter. The term here is "polishing a turd." They don'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 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, I use it to blow leaves off my walking path and into my flower/mulch beds. Prevents me from slipping and helps my plants
- Yeah the rakes don't like it too much when you use them on the road too
The gasoline powered blowers are also one of the worst polluting motors in common use.
- Absolutely. And all those emissions are taking place very close to a human's face.
- 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.
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.

Can't wait to use this in Leaf Blower Revolution

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.

how they did it:

they used an electric motor.

They started with an electric leaf blower as a baseline. Theirs is 40% quieter than the current electric leaf blowers on the market.
- that's pretty cool.
  
  Unfortunately not very many people seem to use electric leaf blowers here, and even if you were to transmute that addition to an ICE blower it wouldn't make a difference considering that the engine would still be loud as fuck.

"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".

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.
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.

Too bad no one invented rakes yet.

You ever tied using a metal rack on pavement? It's about as pleasant as nails on a chalkboard.
spoiler

sdfsaf
- Kinda, although recent vacuum cleaners are way less noisier than gas-powered leaf-blowers.
Jackhammers are so loud, haven't they heard of a hammer yet? I am very smart btw.
- What do leaf blowers do that rakes don't? I don't remember the last time I saw or heard a leaf blower.
- Jackhammer and a hammer are not doing the same job. Pickaxe is more akin to a jackhammer.

This does nothing to address the lovely whirl of a 2 stroke.

Electric leafblowers exist. That problem is already solved.
Wat? I can't hear you over the eeeeeeeEEEEEEEEeeEeeeEeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEUUMMbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Middlebrow dismissal. These are designed for electric blowers.

Yes its called not gas powered.

This is about making an electric leaf blower even quieter. The students were not given a gas leaf blower to design around.
- How could you possibly know this!?