Whisper Aero Wants to Make Aviation, and the Rest of the World, Quieter

upstart writes:

Whisper Aero wants to make aviation, and the rest of the world, quieter:

The world is loud. If delivery drones and air taxis - also known as electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft - gain the level of market saturation investors are hoping for, cities and neighborhoods are only going to get noisier.

That's the assumption, anyway. But Whisper Aero does not seem to care much for assumptions.

The premise of the two-year-old startup is that there should not be a trade-off between technological progress and noise: You should be able to quietly rid your lawn of leaves, heat and cool buildings, and even take an air taxi ride. To get to that future, Whisper says it has developed a never-been-done-before electric propulsion device (to get really specific, an electric ducted fan) that's both quieter and more efficient than ones already on the market.

[...] Whisper has designed an electric-ducted fan that can be scaled up or down for different applications. Over the past two years, the company has designed, built and flown nine generations of this propulsor. They've settled on a product that both reduces the amplitude - how loud something is - and that shifts the tonal profile of the noise to something more pleasant. The company says they've even been able to move some of the tones into the ultrasonic, beyond what the human ear can detect.

[...] Following a well-trod path in aerospace, Whisper will focus its initial commercialization efforts with the U.S. Department of Defense, an agency that they've already been working with for testing. Whisper has scored a handful of small government contracts from the DOD, including the Air Force Research Lab, to validate their propulsor.

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