After a tiring week of FOP, we’re back in business. We continued to find ways to optimise the fan blades and make them quieter. Taking inspiration from a zipline blade used to deliver medical supplies in Rwanda, Jedidiah designed three asymmetric blades with varying angles between blades, and found that efficiency is highest at an intermediate angle. She eloquently named them “long boi”s, with a patent pending. Using Fusion360, Jedidiah varied the angle between the two-by-two blades at the top and bottom, and ran SolidWorks simulations to obtain the following efficiency results. For “long boi”, an intermediate angle yielded the best efficiency of 62.1% compared to a smaller angle at 58.3% and a larger angle at 56.7%. 

For our progress on electronics, we noticed that brushless motors continued to be problematic, and are now posing power issues. The brushless motor’s inrush current requirement was too high to overcome. Tony suggested putting batteries in series and consequently bumping voltage up. However, this introduced another problem as we now need to step down the voltage in order this to function as power bank, yet USB only supports 5V.