`Flying carpet` of conductive plastic takes flight
Baku, October 4 (AZERTAC). A miniature magic carpet made of plastic has taken flight in a laboratory at Princeton University.
The 10cm (4in) sheet of smart transparency is driven by "ripple power"; waves of electrical current driving thin pockets of air from front to rear underneath.
The prototype, described in Applied Physics Letters, moves at speeds of about a centimeter per second.
Improvements to the design could raise that to as much as a metre per second.
The device`s creator, graduate student Noah Jafferis, says he was inspired by a mathematical paper he read shortly after starting his PhD studies at Princeton.
He abandoned what would have been a fashionable project printing electronic circuits with nano-inks for one that seemed to have more in common with 1001 Nights than 21st-Century engineering.
Prof James Sturm, who leads Mr Jafferis` research group, conceded that at times the project seemed foolhardy.
"What was difficult was controlling the precise behavior of the sheet as it deformed at high frequencies," he told the BBC.
"Without the ability to predict the exact way it would flex, we couldn`t feed in the right electrical currents to get the propulsion to work properly."
What followed was a two year digression attaching sensors to every part of the material so as to fine-tune its performance through a series of complex feedbacks.
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