Building a Quieter Leaf Blower
Innovating noise reduction technology for leaf blowers.
Having a beautiful and functional yard is as American as apple pie. People spend time mowing their lawns and cleaning up fallen leaves with a leaf blower, usually a gasoline powered blower.
While a leaf blower does a good job, it is also very, very loud, as anyone trying to concentrate when one is being used can attest to. Now, a group of undergraduates at Johns Hopkins University have discovered a way to make leaf blowers nearly forty percent quieter, according to the Johns Hopkins University’s Hub.
This is really important because the issue of noise pollution is often overlooked. Noise pollution can have grave effects on stress, high blood pressure, hearing loss, interrupted sleep, and more, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. It is for this reason that the device created by students could have such a big impact on quality of life for so many people.
A challenge
The road to a quieter leaf blower began with a challenge, according to the Hub. Undergrad engineering students in the last year of their degree were tasked with creating a leaf blower, electric or battery operated, that was less noisy but also had just as much power as a typical leaf blower.
“We spent many hours on this project, just going through the various versions of it, just constantly iterating and improving and so for that to finally pay off, this was really, really rewarding,” team member Michael Chacon, told Hub.
The team of four students spent months going over leaf blowers to analyze the sounds and where they came from to be able to make it quiter.It took a whole year, according to ABC 2 Baltimore, but amazingly, the students succeeded.
The students used 3D printing to quickly create prototypes. “Some of them succeeded, some of them failed. That's just what the engineering process is all about, but with that, we eventually came across the final prototype that we have today,” team memberAndrew Palacio told ABC 2.
They tried out more than forty versions of their solution until they got it right. The team, according to Hub, settled on an attachment that muffles the sounds and works like a muffler on a car.
“Our product takes in a full blow of air and separates it,” team member Leen Alfaoury told Hub.. “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.”
Ready to go
Officials at Black and Decker, which also sponsored the project, were very impressed with the student’s work. They plan to start manufacturing this new prototype and have it on store shelves within two years.
“It's not just some cool theoretical thing that will sit on a shelf and never be heard from again — this is ready to be mass manufactured”, Nate Greene, a senior product manager at Black and Decker said. That’s pretty impressive for a group of undergrads.
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