Should Parachutes Spin? 

More info about the drone can be found on my second channel: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WNniGZMmd84.html

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Autorotation. The reason why helicopters don't fall like a rock when their engine cuts out.

Finally, a solution to send my love letters to my hot 1st-floor neighbor

Great video man! I want your t-rex 700 :)

Got to adore how he can just, get an idea from finding a seed.

Not sure how feasible it is, but it would be amazing to see you build a 3d printed gyroplane and try some pinpoint landings.

When T-posing not only shows dominance, but also slows your descent...

can we expect a tom vs william osman egg drop comp sometime soon?

Yaaaay! Finally some quality internet content.

3:12 this is how helicopters can glide with out the engine working, I actually learnt this the other day in Smarter Every Day

This is autorotation but without the flare with full rpm at the end of the ''landing''

I haven't finished watching yet, but I just wanted to let you know something. I occasionally fly RC autogyros, and to save from breaking blades and hubs, we use soft balsa shear pins and one of our two points connecting the blade to the hub. The other being a bolt that allows for rotation, so when there's a blade strike, the sheer pin breaks, and the blade can fold back and hopefully not break.

The same kind of rotary effect happens when helicopter engines fail. We saw this in the Australian fires recently where a firefighting helicopter went down and the pilot walked away from the crash landing. People expect helicopters to go down like a rock, but unless they have rotor damage, or the pilot loses control, the fall causes the rotors to spin and slow the descent. It is called autorotation. The record for this was set in 1972 when French aviator Jean Boulet had an engine flameout at 40,814 feet and he was able to use autorotation to safely land the helicopter. Incidentally, that flight is still the highest that any helicopter has ever flown and the flameout is the reason no one else has tried to beat it. BTW, the American military has a decoration called the ‘broken wing’ for any pilot who successfully autorotates in an emergency and saves lives as a result.

In my final year at uni I had a very similar concept for slowing down payloads dropped from a UAS. The rotor would be tensioned on a wound spring to provide that initial spin once dropped and allow the payload to be dropped at a lower altitude without plummeting. Unfortunately it would have been heavier than parachutes and mass was at a premium to keep it below the 7kg limit. This was for the IMechE UAS Challenge by the way and well worth checking out if you haven't already. The design would also have changed the pitch of the rotors to benefit from auto-rotation, then use that momentum to produce a lot of lift nearer the ground. I'm really happy you made a video on this as it was something I obsessed over for the better part of a year. Great work!

You kinda look like Ed Sheeran if he had an aerospace degree

Since years I was wondering how exactly a Autorotor works and never found a good explanation. You did that in 30s and now I understand. THANKS!

I'd love to see some experiments with a bit of twist to the blades and some taper/elliptical planform. As an ex-skydiver, I doubt that rotors will replace parafoils even if they could be made better...foils can bounce off each other and are not chopping devices after landing!

Talking about the sponsor while still showing your own footage was genius!

I would love to see you have a go at a Rogallo Wing/Parawing recovery system similar to that of the Gemini program that was proposed. You could even have a go at a lifting body craft and ways to combine both.

In WW2, the U.S. Army used a single blade case, like a very large version the leaf shown in the video, to airdrop a vacuum tube radio without damage. The spinning case was less subject to wind drift allowing more accurate drops.

Thank you Tom for your fantastic content. I love it all, and the way that you integrate your advertisement for your sponsors is classy, unobtrusive, and perfect.

5:19 look at how that cloud is disturbed by the wake turbulence

cool, but could you imagine jumping out of a plane with like 5 guys who had these and the're all spinning mad, better not float too close....

Thanks for making this video! Now you've made a particular person to be curious and be more open-minded to what was found from before and how to improve. Great video!

This is probably the best way to plug a sponsor, without having the audience skip it. Keep up the good work man!

All schools should have many lessons like this, just to engage thought process at least.

Another reason seems that the rotating chutes wouldn't work well when you need multiple. Most capsules use between 3 and 4 chutes at a time.

Thanks for the second channel :) Awesome content, get so exited when you put out a video :)

Best videos on the internet.. never stop wondering and learning. Tom incorporates this perfectly!

So Awesome dude, great job as always!

I always like these seeds. So fun and interesting! Nature was being creative!

Man, you are one of my favourite RU-vidrs because, like myself, you are naturally curious about the world around you. I like your scientific method in each of your videos and you always get a laugh out of me at least once per video. Keep doing what you do.

Very cool. I love videos like this. No non-sense, educational, and entertaining. Thanks for posting.

2:25 it actually landed straight in the ground and sticked. nice.

There's also the Rotary Rocket "Roton", worth reading about.

You would love the MTA boomerang. If you are not familiar look them up on here. I think you will be very impressed with how long they can stay in flight. Sometimes up to 3--5 minutes in thrown properly.

Thank you for reminding me about the paper helicopter. I haven't made one of those in years. Getting paper now!

My teacher made us make this paper toy at school. It was fun throwing it up to the air and seeing whom falls the slowest.

You spin me right round 🎵 That was super interesting (as always). I presume we shall be seeing some Joe Barnard second channel type content from Tim Station? 😉

Great channel, easily understood. Brilliant definition of engineering by Keeping it simple

The Maple seed wing is not to slow the decent, rather it is extend the distant from the parent tree so it will be out of its shade when sprouting.

If I'm not mistaken, there's actually a gyrocopter-parachute thing. "Heliofly." It doesn't involve helium gas.

We tried putting one of these on a rocket in our latest video.... didn't go so well tho

All of my kids had "protect an egg when dropped" competitions when they were in school . They made 4 blade ( two upper & two slightly lower ) balsa wood devices based on the auto rotation paper heli .... worked great to protect the egg !

This is really interesting experiment, thank you I learned something new today :)

I used exactly this to make an egg drop in my engineering class. Carried two eggs safely down a 20 ft drop

The real engineer is the tree.....

Cool video and nice explanation Tom!

I really feared for that drone there, Tom! Thanks for doing the tests 'so that others don't have to’.

To put things simply, it transfers the energy into spinning.

I've made disk gap band parachutes and I wanted to try spinning parachute soon

Great explanation, I love how you always take some time to talk about the WHY, instead of just going, oh here's a thing I made.

Wow great video, it would be great seeing more stuff like this

its pretty obvious when you think about it because its using some of its potential energy to spin rather than using it all to fall.

Tom is my aspiration

Cool. Thanks for showing us this. I've always wondered how auto rotation works

Excellent research from a simple self-asked question regarding seed pod observations - keep up the great work.

Me: jumping from the Empire State building: "SPEEN!"

I actually got the same idea while playing KSP. It cost a few test subjects, but I did get the concept to work.

The auto gyro explanation came at a great time for me. Well into my aerospace engineering degree so it made perfect sense. Awesome video!

i ALWAYS picked them up as a kid and had so much fun playing with the seeds

Hi Tom, I had a question that kept me wondering, would the parachute descend slower if it had a hole in the middle. Nice video and a brilliant question. Keep up the good work.

Inspector Gadget had this figured out years ago.

Your vids are always very interesting. Keep it up.

oh man, my mate had a kit built autogyro on his farm, never rode it but it's nice to know a bit o' the science behind it now

this had much less to do with those little helicopter seeds than I wanted it to.

Potential energy gets converted to rotational

Thanks for always posting quality content !!! Best regards.

Ah sycamore seeds. The real treat is finding two stuck together

What flight controller does that drone have?

I want to be under 3 spinning propellers when they hit the ground. Fo sho !

Thank you, Tom. Very interesting!

Wow I used to play with these as a kid. I completely forgot about them until now.

This sounds like it could be a breakthrough technology in some time if somebody figures out how to make it more reliable. With some testing I don’t see why it couldn’t become as reliable as a regular parachute.

FYI, the design of a sycamore seed (and its rotation characteristics) have been used for 40+ years in the design of Maximum Time Aloft (MTA) boomerangs. By having a shape like a hockey stick, there is a differential lift that makes the boomerang fly upwards, somewhat along an exponential curve that circumscribes an inverted cone (near enough). So, when the 'rang is released (spinning vertically about a horizontal, transverse axis), the precession of the spinning 'rang makes it 'lay over' so by the time it's at the top of its flight (30-50m), it's spinning about a vertical axis, much like a sycamore seed. Placing weights around the centre of gravity of the boomerang shape also affects the rate of 'layover' (which is like the 'bias' of the seed/'feather' combination -- we're talking about modifying the moment of inertia here). I haven't thrown competitively for over 20 years now.. but back in the '80s/'90s it was relatively easy to get 50m 'stabilized' flying heights and 60+ second flight times for a 'rang that's something over 35cm across its tips. If you were 'lucky'(!?), you could get the 'rang into a thermal and with a stable spin, it could rise and fall a handful of times so 200+ second flight times were possible. Rotary wing dynamics is such a *fun* study... (errr, ... yeah). :) Edit: An old reference, f'sure... but it shows when I had the Australian record for MTA flight (with a return within a 50m radiuscircle) - I was kinda disappointed that it took more than 10 years for the record to be broken (!) ... www.boomerangpassion.com/competition/records/

As you were talking about this I envisioned a parachute, but different than the vortex one. I imagined one that was similar to a regular parachute, but with flaps that start of closed, until the pressure gets to a certain amount, then they open, causing it to spin, with some connector in the middle that allows the chute to spin, but not the cargo below it.

There's limited potential energy from dropping something, spinning requires energy that would otherwise go to falling.

Using the scientific practice of repetition to “force” people to watch your sponsor. Smart

Hi Tom, your videos are great! I’d really like to see another air powered plane video, maybe with the v3 engine again. You could also try adding a bigger bottle to allow for more range but it might add a bit too much weight. If so it would be much appreciated.

Gotta get my comment in when Tom might actually see it (pretty cool if you're actually reading this) I love that you include advanced (but not overbearing) legitimate mathematics and physics into your videos. It's both entertaining AND educational and I love the balance! Great work!

Nice drone, looks clean and simple!

I'd love to see you do that with a ram-air parachute. What would be REALLY cool is if you could build a remote control "jumper" to steer it while it descends.

i love this watching for second time on your vids i learn more

You do great stuff tom! Keep going^^

I like this video, its an easy idea to wrap your mind around idea but an interesting and relevant one, tested in simple and direct ways I noticed that the normal parachutes had a tendency to have a slight spin to them as well, interesting. One thing to talk about that I think is relevant is that the thing has to get a pretty good spin rate going to slow down, and at a certain point you might have to worry about nausea from the human in the parachute, or additional engineering complexity to make it so the chute can rotate freely without the attached body

In college, my team used an autocopter design to win an egg drop competition where resources were limited to 50 3x5 cards and a roll of scotch tape. You won by dropping it safely from a third story balcony the most times. It was kind of breezy but since our drag to weight ratio was good, the spin kicked in right away and the gyroscopic effect prevented tumbling. All of the parachute-like and crumple-zone designs eventually broke, but our copter could have kept going and going. The egg was barely kissing the ground on each landing.

And during high jumps in kitesurfing, the kite is being "heli looped" straight above head on the decent to generate lift for soft landings. For more parachute expirements, you might consider sew an inflatable propeller, similar to a RAM AIR matress kite, but just twisted in the middle like a propeller and bridled towards 1 center point. Maybe worth looking a software like "Surfplan".

Glad that you are back from the hectic children in the US. Your mellow and professional style is so much more enjoyable.

I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, but you can explain things in a way i understand and enjoy. Thank you very much tom!

Thanks for the video. I was hoping for some more explanations though.

Great vid as always! Nice surprise today.

There is one rather common usage for the spinning blade "parachute"; helicopters. In case of engine power loss, a helicopter wont fall like a rock, rather it will glide down because of the same principle. This is called autorotation and it is something the pilot has relatively good control over.

I picked up an estes rocket cheap in a charity shop that has a helicopter recovery for the nose and a parachute for the fuselage. I haven't got round to flying it yet but it looks like it should work quite well.

In 6th grade I added some wings angled down for a egg drop project and a parachute. The cup was holding the egg and it worked and mine was the best and the smallest.

Can we all appreciate how smart it is to put the footage we came here for during the add instead of some stupid video of him on a computer going over a website

Very nice video Tom! I might have to give to spinning parachute a try too. :) It would have been interesting to compare the normal chute to a centrally reefed chute of the same size. This increases the drag coefficient. The vortex ring chute also has this central line.

Fantastic video. You went the extra mile with the editing

Do you have a video showing the dropping mechanism? Interesting stuff, thank you!

Subscribed! Thanks Tommy!

What I noticed was that the ones that used a lifting body, slowed the rate of decent gradually while the ones relying on just drag had a hard upward jerk.