Last time we checked in with Whisper Aero, we found this aviation-focused company deep into a side quest, building and demonstrating a leaf blower that moves 40% more air, using 40% less power, and making half the perceived noise of a range of standard blowers.
The company certainly wasn’t founded to build garden tools – but then, what better way to demonstrate a very nifty new way of pushing air? And it was clearly a great business move; Whisper has since signed some sort of licensing deal with Stanley Black & Decker, which plans to get it into a range of consumer products. That could be a handy revenue stream as Whisper pursues its core vision: quieter electric aircraft.
Whisper Co-Founder and CEO Mark Moore, formerly an aerospace engineer at NASA, first showed up on our radar back in 2010 with his own electric aircraft concept, the Puffin – a deeply disturbing, single-person, tail-sitting eVTOL designed to fling a pilot through the air head first in a Superman-style prone position.
But as the eVTOL air taxi “gold rush” kicked off, he wisely pivoted to selling shovels rather than get involved in the extremely expensive process of trying to get a novel class of aircraft through the FAA’s type certification process. Electric air taxis could get a lot more people airborne and commuting in 3D – but to change the way we get around at scale, they need to be a lot quieter and more efficient than today’s helicopters and small planes.
Whisper Aero
Whisper’s chief innovation is its UltraQuiet WhisperDrive. It’s an electric ducted fan. It’s fairly small in diameter, and uses an unusually large number of strong, stiff blades, reinforced by a shrouding ring that joins the blade tips together, inside a lightweight, acoustically treated duct.
With lots of blades in the fan, it can push more air while spinning slower, and the “blade passage frequency” moves up to more than 16,000 Hz – outside the range of most human hearing, but not high enough to freak dogs out – while the RPM stays low enough to ensure the added weight of the outer ring doesn’t tear the fan apart due to centrifugal force.
Whisper Aero
The company has now secured funding to stick the UltraQuiet WhisperDrive in an AirPlane and fly it in TheSky, thanks to a US$500,000 grant from the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, which will see a team from Tennessee Technological University retrofitting the propulsion systems to a glider.
The plan is to use two of Whisper’s eQ250 units – the largest the company currently makes, albeit with just a 10-inch fan diameter and producing somewhere around 80 lbf of thrust. The aircraft in question, according to AIN, is a Belgian-made Aeriane Swift 3.
This is the electrically-powered version of the foot-launched Swift Light, a tailless composite ultralight with a 42-ft (13-m) wingspan that was originally designed as a hang glider. It sure looks like fun to fly with a regular ol’ propeller on the back:
SWIFT 3 Glider Debut at Coup Icare 2021
The plan is to have a Whisper-quiet version of this thing airborne by sometime later this year.
It will be a fairly humble manned flight debut for the technology, and there’s no mention of whether it’s intended to become a product – but Whisper still has its sights set on bigger things. Its 100-seat Jetliner concept, shown below, promises totally clean, battery-powered flights up to 700 miles (1,127 km), for around a third the energy cost of a similarly sized dinosaur burner.
But commercial aviation is a frustratingly slow-moving industry, with eye-bleeding costs involved in every step of the design, testing, certification and manufacturing process. We don’t expect to see a full-scale Jetliner prototype any time soon, but it’s clear this company will have a role to play in the clean aviation revolution and we’ll be watching with interest!
Source: Whisper Aero via AIN Online