The World's Quietest Electric Engine | Ian Villa, Whisper Aero
My name is Ian Villa. I'm the COO and cofounder of Whisper Aero, and we are building cleaner, quieter, more efficient propulsion for the next generation of drones, aircraft, and really anything that moves air.
Christian Keil:Most engines are very loud. For now, I mean, why don't you tell us, like, just super, super high level, what are the things that can keep an engine like yours both efficient but also quiet?
Ian Villa:Yeah. So the trick that we do is we take all of the sources of noise, we minimize them, and then we push the tones that you typically hear, which is the blade passage frequency, up into the ultrasonic. Blade passage frequency, it's a function of the the rotations per second
Christian Keil:Mhmm. And
Ian Villa:the number of blades that you have. You know, most fans, open rotors, propellers, ducted fans, they have 2, 5, maybe 20 blades. And they're spinning at, like, a reasonable RPM or rotation per second that puts that that frequency right in human hearing. So to get it into the ultrasonic, it has to spin faster. But there's problems with taking the same fan and spinning faster.
Ian Villa:There's contributions to the noise that go with the 5th power of the tip speed. And, if you imagine that, you know, tip speed is a huge contributor and it's a function of your rotations per second. You can't just spin faster to get to lower noise. So our trick has been, we've developed this high blade count fan that you can actually rotate at a reasonable rotation per second. That still puts the blade passage frequency up into the ultrasonic and allows us to do really clean and efficient work as it spins.
Christian Keil:Awesome. So you're basically trading speed for blade count, basically. That's right. The more blades you have, they all have to be smaller. I'm sure it's harder to manufacture, it's harder to make operate as part of a system because they're floppy and and thin.
Christian Keil:But if you can do it, then you get the benefits of higher frequency sound while still being efficient to actually being a good fan and not breaking and all the things.
Ian Villa:Okay. And and high frequency noise attenuates quickly to the atmosphere. So it's actually, you know, it's better to have that high frequency noise if you can do it. But the trick the tricky thing is again, like, you know, our our ears are are quite sensitive and, you know, if you don't push it high enough, it then becomes really grating.
Christian Keil:You know,
Ian Villa:it's really piercing
Christian Keil:Right.
Ian Villa:Really bad.
Christian Keil:You're you're there's a thin margin of error. If you've created a very high pitched noise that's not quite high enough, then that's actually very bad.
Ian Villa:It's it's super annoying. And so that's really the trick. And going to this really high blade count, extremely high blade count, theoretically sounds super easy. In practice, it's actually quite hard. There's there's a reason why nobody's done it before.
Ian Villa:And so there's, like you said, manufacturing challenges. There's really tough design challenges going into that. Things we had to use, you know, state of the art computational tools to actually go figure out. And then all this huge balancing act in order to actually get all those blades to spin and not deform while you're, you know, performing work. Yeah.
Christian Keil:Yeah. I'm excited to talk about all that. We're gonna get to all that in in great detail. I think, maybe the simplest, place to start is just well, first of all, let's say, what are we using the what are we using these for? I mean, there's so many things that you could use this type of thing for but where are you starting and where where is it going?
Christian Keil:Yeah.
Ian Villa:I mean, we harness the power of air every day. We're starting with drones and we're starting with work for the DOD. They understand what what the value of quiet is. And so, it made sense to us to just start there. And they've really been really great partners to us to actually validate and verify that our fans are indeed quieter and more efficient than other things out there.
Ian Villa:But the cool thing is our second product is actually licensing out the tech Mhmm. To an outdoor power equipment company to make the quietest, most efficient leaf blowers on earth. And the play there, you know, one, we had to just make our daily lives better for everybody. But 2 is we've actually innovated this manufacturing technique to make the fan smaller and, you know, still at a price point that consumers can actually pay for. And so when you do that, now you have this fan that's very high performance, very low noise, and and also very cheap.
Ian Villa:And when we think about attritable or expendable drones, this is now a huge enabler that, you know, higher speeds, but also really quiet, more survivable, and right at the price point that actually makes a difference for the DOD.
Christian Keil:Totally. It's funny that the the same technology used in drones and airplanes and is also in leaf blowers. But you gotta move air. You got
Ian Villa:that's the name of the game.
Christian Keil:Yeah. We actually were we were just outside the the studio moving some air. And I we can maybe we can show a video or maybe we can at least We
Ian Villa:can show videos. Yeah.
Christian Keil:Hell, yeah. So that we can then the people can see somewhere on the screen now that this thing is, like, actually moving air. It's not that it's just, like, you know, being a little weak leaf blower. It's, like, actually moving. It's, very quiet.
Christian Keil:My my sleeping baby came up to us as we were doing. My wife brought her baby over and he's just fine. He's chilling. He's not bothered by the sound.
Ian Villa:The first time I've ever seen a baby in front of a leaf blower and not, like, make a face or cry.
Christian Keil:The baby friendly leaf blower. That's Yeah.
Ian Villa:Yeah. I mean, we've literally had dogs at our test fall asleep and this is the middle of the night, like, 3 AM, rural Tennessee.
Christian Keil:I was actually I was wondering about that for the high frequency thing because it's like when like, can like, other animals can hear much higher frequencies than us. So it's like you gotta be be a little careful you're not going to the, like, dog annoying frequency.
Ian Villa:That's right. So we we tune it just, you know, we're we're very particular about the way that we tune it. And I recently just bought a book, to look at, you know, how do different wildlife how are they affected by these different tones?
Christian Keil:Yeah.
Ian Villa:We've done it in such a way that doesn't actually annoy dogs or cats or even birds. So, it's really exciting. I mean, you have to be responsible about that. Right? Like, you don't get to an end product if it's, you know, great for us and not good to everybody else or every every other animal.
Christian Keil:Totally. The the the most extreme version of that would be one that, like, you know, kids would be very annoyed by, but adults can't hear because our hearing is degraded so far. That's right. Yeah. You gotta go much further.
Ian Villa:I mean, yeah. That book even covers, like, fish, like marine life.
Christian Keil:So Alright. A fish friendly leaf blower. That would yeah.
Ian Villa:Who knows?
Christian Keil:I love it. Okay. Let's let's go back to the very very beginning with the very basics of, like, what is noise and, you know, what are the things that both cause it or, like, what is it physically happening in the world, like, super super basics and then we'll build our way up from there.
Ian Villa:Sure. I mean, noise in our daily lives, it's created through all these pressure deltas that's happening through the air. And the air is just a medium to transfer that energy to us. I think, you know, when we're born, we are able to hear from like 20 Hertz to 20 1,000 Hertz.
Christian Keil:Mhmm. And
Ian Villa:like you said, like over time, we hear a bunch of things. We go to concerts. Our hearing degrades. But all around us, these pressure waves are still happening. And so when we've taken that understanding of noise and how we perceive noise, it's all been a matter of, like, okay, noise is energy, very simplistic kind of thinking there.
Ian Villa:But noise is energy. If we can actually reduce the noise and perform work in a way that doesn't create that noise, then we're doing more with the energy we're putting into the system, which is to say, we're more efficient.
Christian Keil:Yeah. And I mean, the the interesting thing about it though is that I mean, because noise is pressure, because pressure is presumably proportional to, like, the amount of energy that's being put into the system from a fan or something.
Ian Villa:Mhmm.
Christian Keil:If you have something that is quieter, sort of, by definition, it's, like, okay, there's less energy there. But I guess the the answer is we can either put it to where people can't hear it. You use the
Ian Villa:energy to do work. Sure.
Christian Keil:So it's the most efficient use of that that energy. Okay. That's right. Yeah. And then with so if you have high efficiency, if you have, you know, high frequency, that's what keeps something from being annoyingly loud.
Ian Villa:Not necessarily. But it because of what we do, we're we're minimizing that and then pushing it into a realm. So, like that blade passage frequency. Right? We're not, it doesn't fully disappear.
Christian Keil:Sure. There's still pressure that is happening. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Ian Villa:Right. But it's it's there where you don't perceive it, where dogs aren't annoyed by it, and it's still minimized in in such a way where we're still doing the most with what we're putting into the system. Totally.
Christian Keil:I think it's I mean, there are a bunch of, physical analogs that people are probably familiar with that would give them intuition about this. I mean, it's everything from, like, you know, when something is whirring up, you can hear, like, start low and it, like, rises in pitch as it's going. Exactly. I mean, pitches are literally, like, higher frequencies. It's it's frequencies.
Christian Keil:Yeah. It's literally just like, if you're singing a note, I don't know if people generally know this, but, like, on a piano, a, the same notes are just, like, the multiples of each other. So, like, a c and a c is just, you know, twice the frequency of that thing. Right. So as you go up the piano, you have higher and higher frequency noise and then eventually you go so far off the piano that you can't hear it anymore and that's where you guys are trying to operate.
Ian Villa:Exactly. And, you know, maybe going another layer deeper, it's not just about that single frequency, but, you know, every frequency or every tone you you create often has harmonics. Yes. So those harmonics, we also have to think about those harmonics when we're designing these fans and and even that plays a role, like, can you push all of that content much higher so it attenuates faster and it's, you know, less less annoying.
Christian Keil:Is it, is the so to, like, to go into that level of detail, is it, like, you are so first of all, I imagine you have to, like, really characterize, like, what the, like, what all those, you know, waves are and, like, what the harmonics of the thing are and things like that And you're you're trying to are you trying to, like, spread across lots of frequencies? Are you trying to get it so that, all of the frequencies are quiet? Or, like, can you just say a little bit more about that next layer of detail?
Ian Villa:I think the easiest way to to think about it is you you know where the sources of noise are coming from. And like I said, you're you're trying to minimize those. And then when where you have play to actually affect the region or frequency of those tones, you do that. And so, oftentimes, the blade the blade passage frequency is one thing you can play with. But the other rotating component in there is the motor.
Christian Keil:Mhmm.
Ian Villa:So the motor borne noise, so, you know, stator tooth count, how many poles you've got. Like, all of that actually plays into the motor noise, which is similar to the blade passage frequency, something that you can visually see ramp up as you go up in RPM. So all of these things, you know, you can play around with those tones. You can minimize them. Often minimizing them means, you know, can you use, like, more laminar flow over your your blades?
Ian Villa:Can you ensure that there's less separation? You know, going back to those pressure deltas. Yeah. Those if you can minimize the amount of pressure deltas that aren't performing useful work, when you're you therefore are decreasing those aerodynamic tones. And then there's, you know, there's particular tones that stand out, but there's also broadband.
Christian Keil:Which is just sort of everything. Like, just all of it.
Ian Villa:It's it's like that white noise or and, you know, it's it's there and it's kinda like constant and maybe spread across a bunch of these these frequencies, but, there's ways to also minimize that and it and it again goes back to, like, how can I make the aerodynamics of this much much cleaner? Interesting.
Christian Keil:Yeah. I mean, there's so so, like, I'm like a rocket person. Right? Like, I'm a space person. So it's like my, sort of, concept of aerodynamics.
Christian Keil:We don't have to worry about noise. There's just no. There's nothing for it to, nobody can hear you scream in space. Everybody's far
Ian Villa:away too.
Christian Keil:Exactly. And everything's so far away. But, like, for planes, which I've been starting to learn more about, I mean, a lot of those concepts are things that are obviously very relevant to a planes and, like, engine. Right. And I've done a lot of I've done more sort of, like, supersonic, hypersonic stuff and, like, thinking about, like, like, transonic regime and things.
Christian Keil:And one thing that I know, which I'm curious to ask you about, is, like, when a plane, like, a just a normal, like, passenger plane is getting up or maybe even just, like, a, you know, a fighter jet or something. It's getting close to the speed of sound, but not quite there. There are already parts of the plane that are moving. They're supersonic. Yeah.
Christian Keil:Which are the mostly the the, like, very tip edge or the the furthest edge out of the blades Right. That are spinning in the engine. And so are there, like, how does are you anywhere close to that? Like, are you're you're you're so much further? Okay.
Christian Keil:Okay.
Ian Villa:And this goes back to tip speed. Right?
Christian Keil:Yeah.
Ian Villa:So we want our tip speeds to be low. You look at, like, these new electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that are starting to be developed. The quieter ones have tip speeds closer to 400, feet per second.
Christian Keil:Oh, okay. Wow.
Ian Villa:And 400 feet per second. Yeah. You're not even you're not even close to Mach. You're, like, I don't know, 0.4, 0.3, like Yeah. Much lower.
Ian Villa:Okay. We go even lower than that.
Christian Keil:Okay. Cool. Yeah. Fascinating. So you're but but it's still the in the way that you can is the relationship, a direct trade off between number of blades and and frequent and, like, the, you know, the speed?
Christian Keil:Are you direct is it direct relationship or do you get, like, you know, diminishing returns to having more blades?
Ian Villa:No. There's there's direct relationships. Okay. The things that you're trading though isn't necessarily the acoustics. It's like, you know, let's say you went to a 100 blades.
Ian Villa:Yeah. That's really tough structurally to keep all of those blades in place. And so that's been part of the core tech that we've developed to enable having all of those blades. In fact, the the trick is we take those blades and we put them in tension, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. And when you, you know, things get stronger when you put them in tension.
Ian Villa:And so by nature of having, you know, 50, 60, 70, maybe even a 100 blades in tension, now you can keep the rigidity of that blade. You can maintain its shape as you're actually, you know, moving at faster and faster speeds. And by nature of maintaining its shape now when when you're performing work, it's not flapping around. It's staying in place and it's doing exactly what you wanted to. Totally.
Ian Villa:There's also, you know, if you go back to your first propulsion course and you think about, you know, how do I generate thrust. Right? Thrust is m dot delta v. But there's this idea of like an actuator disk.
Christian Keil:Mhmm.
Ian Villa:You you imagine like a 5 bladed fan. Yeah. Okay. That 5 bladed fan, yes. It's doing work along each of those blades.
Ian Villa:But if we're gonna simplify the the problem, like, very beginner physics course, you just have a disc that sort of that blade rotates around. And it's, you know, before the disc and then afterwards, there's an instantaneous pressure pulse.
Christian Keil:Mhmm. And
Ian Villa:so, if you think about it, okay, I've got a disc. I have 5 blades. And then you go to, like, a 100 blades. Well, that 100 blade starts to get closer and closer to the that theoretical optimum. In fact, if you went to infinite blades, now you're at an actuator disk.
Ian Villa:Interesting. And so, we get as close as, like, physically possible to getting to the actuator disk.
Christian Keil:That makes a lot of sense. I mean, okay. Let's let's take a tiny step back and say, like, okay. What are the core differences of your fan versus just like an or your engine versus a normal one? I mean, the here's my attempt.
Christian Keil:You you tell me how right or wrong this is. So first of all, electric. Yes. I think it's important to note. Like, it's we're not revving up the the leaf blower beforehand.
Christian Keil:We're just plugging it in or having a battery. Right. Lots of blades, increased high blade count that also helps both efficiency and on the, on the noise side. It's ducted. So it's not freely spinning blades out in space like you're seeing for a lot of the, you know, whatever, like a helicopter or something.
Christian Keil:It's surrounded by a duct. Yep. The the what you just mentioned, the blades are tension held across that duct. And, what, both we'll talk about why that's important in just a second. Sure.
Christian Keil:High RPM, even though but so this is one of the things I wrote down. But now I don't think that's true anymore. It's it's it is high RPM.
Ian Villa:Enough RPM. Okay. So the motors wanted this this is another trick. Motors want to operate at high RPM, like, up 10000 RPM, 20,000 RPM. But you want tip speed to be low.
Ian Villa:Right. So it's like, RPM high, tip speed low. The only trick the only way you do that is by shrinking the fan. Right? R omega.
Ian Villa:There you go. Okay.
Christian Keil:And that that was my last thing on the list which is that they stay small, that they're small diameter. So instead of having massive fans that are, you know, we're having a bunch of smaller fans. Is that that's the those are all the things I could find publicly online. I'm sure there are more. I'm sure there's Good day.
Christian Keil:Secrets. But, yeah, there there was one particular article that really, like, like, dug really deep into the engineering side. Did you guys participate in that or
Ian Villa:was that
Christian Keil:just, like
Ian Villa:I bet she was Alon's. Was it the air current?
Christian Keil:Yes.
Ian Villa:That one. Oh, she's great.
Christian Keil:She's a great reporter. Yeah. Sweet. No. That was that that that was the most helpful piece of research for sure.
Christian Keil:Yeah. I love that article.
Ian Villa:I think she does a better job at explaining it than we do. I
Christian Keil:think so. Yes. That is a good job. I love it. Okay.
Christian Keil:So let's talk about sort of each of those in turn and talk about first quiet and then efficiency. Like, how those different parts of the design would lead to something to be more quiet or more loud or having it be more efficient or less efficient. Sure. So electric versus, like, whatever, like gas, like, what are are all electric engines just quieter because they're not exploding basically or Yeah.
Ian Villa:You're removing that combustion section which accounts for a huge portion of the noise and, you know, we can all sort of think of this when you compare like a Tesla versus, you know, an internal combustion engine car. It's just it's a no brainer. The the nature of, like, firing something up leads to more noise. So by nature of removing that and having electric motor, okay, that that already, you know, takes out 50% of the noise. But having a, you know, electric motor on an open propeller Mhmm.
Ian Villa:You still have the remaining pieces of noise which are aero born. And that's that's sort of where our our tech comes in. That and, you know, even if you take just an off the shelf electric motor, yes, it may have sufficient torque and sufficient power. But, you know, as we've started to optimize the arrow, we've actually found in some cases, our fans are generating, you know, less noise aero wise than the electric motors.
Christian Keil:Wow. Crazy.
Ian Villa:And so we had to optimize the electric motors because that's the thing that gives it away.
Christian Keil:Wow. That's hilarious actually. It's like, the you know, like, when a Tesla pulls away from you, you hear the lovely little whirr, like, that that is enough. Wow. That's kind of remarkable.
Ian Villa:You just hear it's like broadband plus that and then the
Christian Keil:other content is imperceptible. Wow. Crazy. Then I'm sure that probably like a normal combustion engine wasn't even part of the design space when you guys were starting off. You're like, we know we're gonna do electric because it's just quieter.
Ian Villa:Yeah. So here's the other cool thing. When you have these electric motors, the cool thing about electric is it allows us to decouple the components in your power train. Like, back back in the day, think about turbojets, turbo fans, power is is coupled with thrust. Right?
Ian Villa:They're on the same shaft. You have to burn fuel in order to rotate the fan. The rotating of the fan creates thrust. Well, now that you're electric, all you have to do is pull electrons into that electric motor to spin the fan. That those electrons though, like, the actual power and energy source, that can come from any number of things, batteries Sure.
Ian Villa:Turbo generators sucking up fuel, converting that to electricity, passing that into a high voltage bus, a fuel cell. So just by nature of that, I I mean, I I think for us, we care a lot about thrust. And then it goes back to, like, what is the mission you're trying to solve? If your mission is like a 1,000 mile flight, maybe you still have a turbo generator. And that turbo generator is shielded.
Ian Villa:You know, it's not making as much noise as it would. It's also not not trying to do, like, the thrust part of the work. Yeah. Right. So, you know, it's doing what it it needs to do to generate, power and energy.
Ian Villa:And then it passes that out to our thrusters.
Christian Keil:Right.
Ian Villa:But yeah. That's that's kinda like the very nuanced answer there.
Christian Keil:No. That's I mean no. That's part I mean and I'm sure there, you could have an aircraft with different modes too where it's like Yeah. We have, you know, the super silent mode but then we also have just, like, get there fast mode like, for vast majority of the transport, something like that.
Ian Villa:I mean, there's there's cars today that, you know, show off its engine when you're you're break or stop at a light. It's kinda like that.
Christian Keil:Yeah. Regenerative, plane.
Ian Villa:Maybe. Maybe. But, yeah, the I mean, there's there's modes where, you know, you could and we think this this actually matters a lot for regional air mobility where you have a lot of your energy and, reserves reserves energy, reserves power stored in that turbo generator plus fuel. But for the vast majority of your flights, you're actually flying electric on a battery.
Christian Keil:Oh, cool.
Ian Villa:And so, you know, the turbo generator is there for safety, but also for extended range. But otherwise, you know, you could fly all electric and you're getting all the cost and efficiency and, you know, sustainability benefits by by flying that way.
Christian Keil:Nice. Very cool. Okay. So we talked about electric. We did also sort of talk about why lots of blades makes it so that it's quieter.
Christian Keil:But can you just like just summarize quickly, it's because of the the blade tip speed versus,
Ian Villa:So you have lower blade tip speed. You have more blades doing useful work. You now have, like, a very benign pressure pulse coming off of those blades. And also because the blades are smaller and the cords are smaller, we can achieve much more laminar flow over the top and lower surfaces of the blade. And then the other thing to think about is there's portions of the noise related to how much of the air you displace.
Ian Villa:It's going like thickness noise. Sure. Well, you know, if you think about an airfoil Yeah. And you think about shrinking that airfoil down Mhmm. You don't just you don't just, like, shorten the cord and it stays fat.
Ian Villa:The cord and the cord and the thickness scales together. And so, you know, imagine I had, like, 20 blades and then I went to, like, a 100 blades, same diameter. You could actually save So they're
Christian Keil:each okay.
Ian Villa:You could save, like, 20 20 x the volume. Sure.
Christian Keil:Yeah. Yeah.
Ian Villa:So by nature of doing that, you've now reduced that thickness noise.
Christian Keil:Interesting. Okay. Cool. So, just to, like, this tends to be, like, a more, like, beginner podcast or whatever. Where's going in?
Christian Keil:People who don't know. But I love it. It's perfect. So just to, like, say the terms. Like, what you were saying was more laminar flow, which basically means that the flow is sticking to the wing better and not Staying attached.
Christian Keil:And not and not, like, breaking apart in a way that makes it turbulent and crazy and swirling. That's actually we didn't actually talk about that. Maybe let's go to ducted and so we can talk about this directly.
Ian Villa:Let's go ahead.
Christian Keil:The a lot of those swirls that come from a normal blade happen at the end of the wing. Like, they're kind of falling off of the end and they do these crazy spirals kind of off the end of the wing. But because your fit blend is ducted, because your blades are ducted, you don't actually have to worry about that. Yeah.
Ian Villa:To be more precise, because our blades actually have a tip and there's a there's really a shroud around all of those blades Yeah. That vortex loss, you you don't get a shed vortex off the tip. And the though another way to think about this is every single blade has its own wing tip. Right. And so rather than losing energy from that shed vortex, we actually are able to keep it attached and that that saves you about 7% inefficiency.
Ian Villa:Interesting.
Christian Keil:Is that is that a function of the duct or is that a function of it being attached on the along the edge?
Ian Villa:It's it's really a function of the tip having a shroud. Okay. You know, if you if you go to like a turbofan, next time you fly, look at the blades. There's a very fine
Christian Keil:Yeah. There's a tiny gap in between. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Ian Villa:That tip gap actually leads to a lot of losses. And, you know, the way that traditional turbofan manufacturers get around this is they just have a really big fan. And so that, like, materially, that's a very small Sure. Proportion of the overall fan. Now, if you were to take that then and scale it down, just imagine you could scale down a turbofan to something that's like the size of your coffee cup.
Ian Villa:Well, manufacturing tolerance tolerances
Christian Keil:don't change. Totally.
Ian Villa:You know, maybe they change a little bit. But, like, that gap is a larger proportion of that overall fan. That means that that same that same fan design at this size, maybe that fan's like 70% efficient or
Christian Keil:worse. Yeah.
Ian Villa:We can still keep, like, 90, 92 percent efficient fans no matter if you're 4 inches or, like, 4 feet.
Christian Keil:Yeah. But then the other harder part too is that when you have when you're adding the more blades in to that, each blade is thinner. And then, like, I'm sure there's much more wiggle in terms of, like, you know, getting that tolerance be perfect for a very, like, you know, loose blade or whatever. Like, what would you even call that? Like, a, what what would you call the, like, looseness of the blade?
Christian Keil:Oh, I
Ian Villa:mean, there's, like, arrow elasticity that happens when it's it's it's flying and if it wasn't supported. Right. So, you know, rather than having a blade that just cantilevered, we can actually support them at both ends. Yeah. And this is where actually going to a higher blade count helps you.
Ian Villa:Because now when you have multiple blades, it's not like, you know, I have a blade here and then I have a blade here and then I have this, like, really big shroud that has to stay between them. Yeah. And now you've got, like, this t shape that's gonna, like, all wiggle together.
Christian Keil:Yeah.
Ian Villa:Now you have a bunch of these blades that are all supporting each other. Yeah. And, you know, connected, you have this now continuous shroud. But also, you you have, going back to that actuator disk idea, you have a bunch of blades that gets to larger solidity that gets closer to that theoretical, you know, optimum.
Christian Keil:Totally. I think the, so I get the obvious question then is, like, why wouldn't why wouldn't large engines do this? Like, why wouldn't why don't we have all the 7, like, whatever the passengers do?
Ian Villa:They spin fast. Yes. They spin fast. And they would just they would explode.
Christian Keil:They're the they just like the because if you had the big rotating what do you call that part? The shroud? The shroud. If you had the big rotating rotating shroud on a large engine mass. It's a lot of mass.
Christian Keil:It's also, like, it because it's going fast, would it literally just, like, like, like, explode outwards or whatever? Like, would you be able to support itself?
Ian Villa:I I think there might be ways to design it. But it gets a lot trickier. Right? And especially, if you're trying to go at these higher speeds with much larger fans, you know, it's not just about the mass of it. It's about it's inertia.
Ian Villa:And you now have this, you know, mass at the end of a very long blade that's now rotating and getting closer to sonic speeds. Like
Christian Keil:Totally.
Ian Villa:Yeah. You're you're making a tougher problem for yourself. Interesting. Crazy.
Christian Keil:Okay. So we've talked about we talked about electric. We talked about lots of blades. Do you do do you wanna talk a little bit more about the duct of, like, what's the what's the value of a duct and, like, why does it help with efficiency? Why does it help with, no well, for now, let's talk about why it helps with noise.
Ian Villa:I'm gonna talk about the duct and the stators.
Christian Keil:Sure.
Ian Villa:So if you imagine a propeller, if you could visualize the flow, you know, the flow isn't just going straight to the propeller like a straight tube. Sure. It's actually sucking in a bunch of air. And then as it passes through, it it compresses. Or compresses maybe not the right word.
Ian Villa:But it actually filters down.
Christian Keil:Yes. It's coming through for and and, like, yeah, being pulled into the engine.
Ian Villa:Right. And so, and then on top of that, when it's getting pulled through, it's introducing a lot of swirl. Right? These these propellers are rotating. That swirl, similar to turbulence, that swirl is is losses.
Ian Villa:So the cool thing about a duct is the duct allows you to really control the flow through that fan. And then we add stators that deswirl that flow. And by nature of deswirling that flow, we now get more useful work. You know, rather than having, if you imagine a bunch of just imagine air had had, like, vectors to it.
Christian Keil:Yeah. Yeah.
Ian Villa:Rather than having a bunch of vectors that are turned and slightly swirling, we're now using the stator to straighten them back out Yeah. And have all of these, you know, portions of the thrust pointed directly to where
Christian Keil:you want it to go. Yeah. Exactly. You don't you don't because you would otherwise, you would lose the, like, the angle in between them. But instead, it's going straight out the back.
Ian Villa:And and, like, even the shaping of the duct allows you to coerce the flow to move the way that you'd like it. Especially, you know, if you're trying to design the fan, you know, for multiple speed regimes, you really need a you wanna have that tailoring. And also, you know, with the propeller, you know, the flow contracts as it will. Right? It's just kinda like it's it's getting sucked through and then you have this ambient and then how it contracts is like what the air will do.
Ian Villa:Whereas the duct, you can actually shape the duct to contract the flow the way that you want or expand the flow the way that you want. And so then, when you've got this duct that's that's shaped in a particular way and you've got, you know, methods to control your area, the the exhaust area, we there's a ratios between your exhaust area and your fan area. That actually allows you to have optimality across multiple speeds. So then, the other cool thing about ducts is ducted fans allow you to go to higher speeds. Yeah.
Ian Villa:Not surprising. Right? 737 ducted.
Christian Keil:Right. 77 Open propellers on yeah. You don't have prop planes anymore.
Ian Villa:No. It's it's an enabler of higher speed. And then, when you think about noise. Right? Let's go back to the propeller.
Ian Villa:You have this propeller spinning. There's a portion of the noise, like loading noise that's gonna come down, but there's also thickness noise that goes out, that emanates outward. And so this duct, when you've got it in place, what's happening to that thickness noise?
Christian Keil:It's capturing it.
Ian Villa:It's getting it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shielded.
Ian Villa:You have natural shielding due to the duct. And so, if you think about the way that the noise is gonna emanate, you know, rather than having a point source that's gonna spherically emanate and just kinda like hit everything, you have a duct that can kinda concentrate where that noise is going to go and ensure that, you know, in certain directions, you actually are are not gonna annoy, you know, people.
Christian Keil:So I think that the the next place that we should talk about I mean, a lot of these things sound heavy, honestly. It's like, okay, we're adding a duct. That's weight. We're adding the stator. That's weight.
Christian Keil:We're adding the the, the whatever. The I keep forgetting what this part is. Got the shroud. We're adding the shroud, that's weight. So all of those things make it harder to lift something into, you know, that makes the ratio of this the weight of the thing to the actual thrust that's providing lower.
Christian Keil:So what is the or higher. What is what is the way around that? Like, how do we get the what do we get in terms of efficiency? What do we get in terms of performance that allows us to offset that additional weight?
Ian Villa:Sure. I mean, you know, there there are trades between the actual efficiency you've got as well as the the weight you have to hold on board. So, for example, if for a more efficient fan, you would have to carry less energy, right, to go the same distance. Yeah. So that that's the first part of, like, the thinking that we have by nature of pushing to this higher efficiency fan.
Ian Villa:Even if we are carrying some weight and you're higher efficiency, you actually can overcome some of the deficiencies of batteries or some other energy sources. But the other thing that we do is, you know, we try and find multiple ways to leverage our components. So for example, you know, our stators aren't just desoling the flow. But, they literally can be there to, structurally, you know, actually add structure to the overall fan. Or or and they can actually be used to pull heat away from that motor.
Ian Villa:Or or and you can also use them to actually conduct or move electricity into the motor.
Christian Keil:Oh, interesting.
Ian Villa:And so as you try as you start to find, like, ways to, look at these synergies, those those synergistic ways of, like, aligning or multipurposing the elements within that fan reduce the weight, but then also add to the overall efficiency of the system. Interesting.
Christian Keil:I mean, this is this is also my question about keeping the engines small. Because when this when there are when the the downside to more smaller engines is that there's a lot of stuff that in theory you would get returns for if it was just one big thing. Like, you wouldn't have to have multiple individual shrouds. You wouldn't have to have, like, whatever. You wouldn't have to have multiple individual ducks that are surrounding the whole thing.
Christian Keil:That that piece of it seems like that is also a big weight penalty. But that seems like the answer there. It's like, okay. If we have there are other pieces of the system design that we get benefits from that offset those, like, like, like temperature or something. I'm sure that, like, like, temperature or something.
Christian Keil:I'm sure that, like
Ian Villa:Thermal is big.
Christian Keil:Yeah. Thermal is big.
Ian Villa:That's where it's small. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, like, if you imagine cube square law for a motor and you're trying to reject the heat Yeah. As you go to these larger and larger motors, you know, if you wanna keep it air cooled, the surface area of that that motor doesn't increase fast enough.
Ian Villa:Right? The the the volume of your windings, your your magnets, it increases much more quickly. And so now, you've got a huge heat problem. And to reject the heat, you no longer can convect it away. You actually have to add liquid cooling.
Ian Villa:Well, that's mass. Yeah. That's, you know, sure. Maybe you have a bunch of these small ones. But in reality, as you go larger, you have to cool that.
Ian Villa:Mhmm. And even if you think about like a a traditional turbofan, there's a bunch of like thermal components you have to worry about there. A lot of complexity built into that. So that's why going smaller actually helps you. You know, within reason, for a small enough fan, now you can actually convect heat away just using the natural flow coming, you know, getting sucked through that fan, through the stators, and and then pulling heat away from that motor.
Ian Villa:And you get, honestly, you get a little bit of a a a help from that rejected heat towards your thrust. Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Christian Keil:Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Well, one thing that we one thing that that you mentioned very briefly up at the top that we haven't really talked about yet is the the different types of noise and how they are, you know, contributors to this problem that you're trying to optimize for. And I think that you've called the 2 broadband and tonal Mhmm.
Christian Keil:Where broadband is just sort of, like, all of it and tonal is these, like, spiked things at particular frequencies. Right. Can you just talk more about how you think about those and then also how these different parts of the system are, you know, addressing them?
Ian Villa:Yeah. I mean, again, naming the game is minimizing everything. This broadband noise is gonna be spread just a bunch, across a bunch of different frequencies. But it's possible to move that broadband, you know, a collection of this kind of, like, incoherent, but, like, across multiple frequencies, noise into a higher region.
Christian Keil:Mhmm.
Ian Villa:And when it's in a slightly higher region, you now can either use atmospheric attenuation to your benefit. Or there's things like liners you can integrate. And they've got liners on on even traditional turbo fans that can pull that that noise away. Interesting. The cool thing is when you have higher frequency, like, broadband content that you're trying to, you know, get rid of, those liners actually decrease in size.
Ian Villa:Interesting. And when they decrease in size Sure.
Christian Keil:That makes sense. They decrease in weight. Because higher higher frequency means that you don't have to have as thick of a thing to to absorb it, basically. Exactly. What are those things?
Christian Keil:What do they actually look like? Are they like blankets or like, you know, like a noise blanket kind of thing?
Ian Villa:So you buy a Ryobi now I know, like, way too much about leaf blowers. You buy a Ryobi leaf blower today Yeah. And they actually have a foam on insert.
Christian Keil:Really? Yeah.
Ian Villa:You take it apart. Fascinating. And that foam insert is is
Christian Keil:their line. It's the same concept as like a like a recording studio or like we actually we have them for us at, we do like a bunch of like, like, electromagnetic susceptibility testing or whatever, like, e m I e m c testing. Sure. Sure. And for that, we have this, like, we have the cool, like, polystyrene on the wall that, like, absorbs the right frequencies.
Christian Keil:Yeah. Fascinating. It's just that.
Ian Villa:Kind of. There's different there's different kinds of liners you could do and there's, like, more advanced structure ones where now it's it's not necessarily a foam, but there's, like, interesting structures you can use. Yeah. Very cool. You you you can, like, layer them and and tailor them to particular, you know, frequency that you really wanna isolate.
Ian Villa:Interesting. The tones themselves, again, you wanna minimize them and then push them to regions that, you know, your your your ear can't hear.
Christian Keil:Sure. But
Ian Villa:you can't do that with every single frequency. Yeah. So, for example, motors, like, as you're spinning up a motor, even even some of these best motors, their their natural tones will still be in, like, the the thousand to, like, 5,000 Hertz range. You can do things to kinda, like, isolate where they go. But the name of the game is minimizing.
Ian Villa:So, you know, even even if they're there, they're as, like, as as, you know, least intrusive as possible. Yeah. Yeah. And then the last part of this is just, like, how is this fan gonna be operated? And so, if we think about how we perceive noise, you know, there's tones that are just kinda like drawn out inconsistent.
Ian Villa:Mhmm. That is perceived or thought of as very different than something that's like very impulsive. Sure. You know, it's like, just think about, like, a very, like, sharp shrieking noise as opposed as opposed to just like a from
Christian Keil:a Like, you mean, like, the ramp up to the noise, basically. Instead of it being like a spike, it's like a slow increase? Or Sure.
Ian Villa:Yeah. It's like it's like impulse. The edge
Christian Keil:of impulse.
Ian Villa:You know, force times time as a really short time. Boom. Like, that might be, like, very piercing. Like, ah, it sucks. But then, you know, it goes away.
Ian Villa:You're fine. Versus, you know, you're sitting you're sitting in this room and you've got a fan on and it's, like, loud the entire time. That, you know, it may not affect you right up front, but over time, that droning may actually kind of like
Christian Keil:Okay. The
Ian Villa:you know, bringing back to leaf blowers, you know, our homes, each home, the walls of your home, it's got insulation inside. That insulation helps to, you know, get rid of the noise that would be in the the, you know, outside. But, you know, when you're in a Zoom call and you hear somebody's leaf blower, that leaf blower has a very low frequency blade passage frequency, but also, low frequency broadband. So if you move that blade passage frequency up into the ultrasonic and then also have this higher frequency noise, higher frequency broadband, it gets eaten up by the insulation within your home. And then now, we we never have to worry about hearing leaf blowers and waking up in the, you know, Saturday.
Christian Keil:No. Your neighbor. Your your neighbor is now no longer annoying. You can actually be friends with them. Yeah.
Ian Villa:Yeah. Not not me yeah. That and if you're working from home, like, you can take a Zoom Zoom call and never have to worry again.
Christian Keil:Yeah. That literally happens. We were talking about that before. It's like whenever whenever there's somebody working outside, you can just hear it through the right through
Ian Villa:the walls. I we were literally pitching an investor once and we were talking about the leaf blower and then, like, on cue, leaf Nice.
Christian Keil:Leaf blower
Ian Villa:landscaping crew started coming in. It's like You should you
Christian Keil:should just do that. You should, like, whenever you have an investor and you know they're working from home, you just, like, hire a lawn crew to just like, hey neighbor, can we can we offer you this nice service to like clean your lawn at this particular time?
Ian Villa:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think we have yeah. We'll we'll help build the leaf blowers that neighborhoods will actually love.
Christian Keil:So I love it. Okay. Let's talk about efficiency. So all of these things, like, the simplest way to, like, make it something not noisy would just be to, like, run it at a super low speed and just, like, not not get as much performance out of it. But, you have to have high performance for drones.
Christian Keil:You have to have your leaf blower actually move air. So I'm curious, like, at the very high level, like, are there particular, like, benchmarks that you're trying to hit from the efficiency side that would make it, like, good enough or something? Or, like, how how do you think about it from, like, a okay. We could trade off and just get less performance But, like, how low is too low for performance? Like, what are you trying to hit for that?
Ian Villa:Yeah. I mean, there's other there's different ways to think about it. The first that I already mentioned is the fan efficiency. So the fan efficiency itself, like, we've maximized that.
Christian Keil:Mhmm.
Ian Villa:The second thing to think about is, like, okay. Once you integrate the entire fan, or, electric ducted fan, and now you're putting it onto a platform, an aircraft, a product, you know, how many pounds of thrust are you getting per watt going in?
Christian Keil:Mhmm.
Ian Villa:That's that's also a pretty important metric. And then, what's the relative delta of that versus, you know, the competing product?
Christian Keil:Sure.
Ian Villa:For the leaf blower, what we've been able to show is, like, we can not only move 40% more air, but we can also use 40% less power and still be 45 d v Wow. At 50 feet. Damn. Yeah. So so all of these kinda combination combinatorial metrics, like, efficiency matters, but efficiency only matters if you're still getting the end result, which is moving air or propelling something through the sky and still being quiet.
Ian Villa:And that kinda like multi variable objective, that's that's we're balancing that all the time. And there's there's gonna be cases where you sell out for efficiency and it's maybe, you know, not moving a lot of or maybe it's moving lots of air. Maybe it's on a drone. And by nature of selling out for efficiency, you can go with, like, a, a more, like, a heavier motor. That's, like, one trade you could do.
Ian Villa:Or maybe you've got you just wanna go for like a a COTS motor. The COTS motor's got like 70% efficiency at the shaft. Like, okay. Great. Then I gotta make sure that my fan is very, very efficient.
Ian Villa:And then I gotta make sure the integration of that fan doesn't have any more losses to overcome the the lossiness of that electric motor. So the the actual efficiency stacking matters a whole lot.
Christian Keil:Yeah. This is because you ran that test. Right? Like, one of the I think this is on your website publicly. It's like the the test of your, it it was your fan with a with a cots motor.
Christian Keil:Was that what it was?
Ian Villa:There's 2. So there's multiple tests. Okay. We're big believers in showing and not just telling. So there's the first video where we have our 10 pound thruster against, 2 electro ducted fans that you could buy off the shelf and then 2 aeronaut cam carbons.
Ian Villa:These are open props. That very clearly shows, like, not only the noise delta, but also an efficiency delta. When you integrate that onto a drone, we actually see, you know, 2 times benefit over the other electric ducted fans. And I think it's almost like a 7 x delta over, an an open prop solution. So this what does that tell you?
Ian Villa:I mean, that that means that you not only have to optimize the efficiency of that that ducted fan, but also the integration matters a whole lot too. If you take a, you know, if you take a really great electric ducted fan and you integrate it in a sloppy way, you're gonna introduce losses. Like, you know, if you put a fan and it's ingesting really bad air, it's gonna lose a lot of that that, efficiency. Versus if you take a bad fan, but you integrate it really well, well, now maybe you get a little bit more performance out of that. But, really, what you really want is is high efficiency, high performance fan integrated in the right way so that now you're yielding all of the benefits and it's not, you know, just additive but actually multiplicative in terms of the performance benefit.
Christian Keil:Totally. I think, this is a fine time to turn to sort of like the what makes this hard section because I think, you know, there the, like, the the conceptual way that you've, like, oriented this part or, like, the the cons the concept behind the product, like, the physics of the product make a ton of sense. I think the engineering is really hard. Like, actually getting that concept to be in the world and working sounds really hard. And so one thing to share with the audience before the before we get going is that you've actually been doing a little bit of, like, a Manhattan project vibe with how you've built this product, which I absolutely love.
Christian Keil:Would you mind telling us about the, like, the the facility and, like, where the all this is being built and where you're proving that you can actually turn it from physics into engineering?
Ian Villa:Yeah. I mean, we're based in Tennessee. So we've got 3 offices now or we've got 56,000 square feet, a 40,000 square foot factory, an 8,000 square foot engineering facility in Nashville, and then another 8,000 square foot sort of flight test hangar. But we didn't we weren't always there. We actually my my cofounder, Mark, he bought this resort in rural Tennessee, and it's on a lake.
Ian Villa:It's 20 acres. There's, 12,000 square feet of lab space and then 28,000 square feet of of apartments because it was a resort. They were they were units. And so in the middle of COVID, we raised, a pretty substantial seed round, hired the starting team, and then we all literally lived, worked, played together on this resort, which is awesome.
Christian Keil:That's so awesome. Yeah. The lake dream start up vibes, honestly.
Ian Villa:Yeah. I mean, you've if you really wanna, like, live live it, and you have to if you wanna survive, early days, that that was an ideal space, especially in COVID. So we had a lake. There's a beach. We had a garden.
Ian Villa:There's a chicken coop. We get, like, fresh eggs every day. Tennis courts. And the tennis courts was was where we would test. Nice.
Ian Villa:We would we would test in the middle of the night. Mark Mark hadn't completed all his reservation, renovations. And so, you know, some of our earliest tests, we were, like, hanging off the rafters of the building. Probably not like OSHA said.
Christian Keil:This is this is classic startup. Like, in the very early days of Astronaut, they wanted to test, like, a gyro that was on the satellite. And the the solution was hang it off of the 2nd floor of the of the loft and just, like, spin it on a string and then let it try to stabilize itself, like, classic.
Ian Villa:You just gotta you have to bootstrap in, like, any any way possible. So we started there and, you know, that became a proving ground for us to really rapidly test the the tech, ensure that we we hit all of the the metrics we thought we were gonna hit. And it was going back to that, you know, can we get 90% fan efficiency? Can we be, you know, really, really quiet, achieve this ultrasonic blade passage frequency? And we did that.
Ian Villa:It was just a really awesome, you know, place to to go build. It still is. You know, our flight test hangar is 5 minutes away from there. Oh, nice. The the factory is 10 minutes, maybe less than 10 minutes away from from there.
Ian Villa:So we're we're kinda building up this really interesting aerospace community in Tennessee.
Christian Keil:In Tennessee.
Ian Villa:Yeah. And we're leveraging all the benefits of precision manufacturing, EV, electric mobility that's starting to move to the, say, Ford, GM, Nissan, building up factories, LG Chem. And then you have aerospace surrounding. Right? So great schools like Georgia Tech.
Ian Villa:You have Huntsville, Alabama. Just a lot of really surrounding areas. We can pull resources in an unconventional way, but, actually, makes a lot of sense the more you you look at it.
Christian Keil:I love it. And so what in at that facility, you had to prove that this physics idea of, like, how you could build an engine could actually work in the real world. I'm sure that transition was hard, and it took a lot of learning and a lot of prototypes and a lot of testing and, you know, ultimately figuring out, okay, here is a here is a design that works. So, like, here's a a point design that we can build around that kind of thing. What were sort of the biggest barriers between physics and engineering for you?
Ian Villa:Yeah. I think, you know, we have a really great design team. Like, you know, while the the hardware is impressive, to get there, we invested a lot in actual, like, CFD Sure. Multi fidelity, variable fidelity tools, and then coupling those tools so that we can actually optimize, which is easier said than done. Like, a lot of people will take, like, an ANSYS or something off the shelf and then run those.
Ian Villa:But for what we were trying to achieve, like, one, a lot of these acoustic prediction tools just don't exist. There's there's tools that have been built before but oftentimes, acousticians or acoustic engineers, they're dealt they're dealt the aircraft design after it's kinda locked. Sure. Very seldom.
Christian Keil:It's like a it's like a post facto or like the analysis after it's done. Okay. What's it gonna sound like? As opposed to, like, iterating fast and having to do it, like, many times over and over and over again. Right.
Ian Villa:Someone designs the airplane or the engine and they're like, okay. Now, you your job is to make it quiet. And it's like, dude, you, like, designed the thing. I can't I can't do anything upfront. So we had to design this computational framework that could combine, you know, high fidelity acoustics, aerodynamics, structures, combine them all into sort of this the singular framework and then be able to make those traits.
Ian Villa:Right? You think about old school aerospace. You got like an arrow guy. He's like, alright. I did my part.
Ian Villa:Here you go. Structure's team. Exactly. And they just kinda like pass it down the line. What we wanted to do is actually have all of these disciplines operate at the same time.
Ian Villa:So when we run an analysis, it's not like, okay, are are we getting to a closed fan? It's like, no. We have a bunch of these closed designs. Let's optimize over millions of them and get to to actually what we want. So that was one of the first, like, really tough barriers to to overcome.
Ian Villa:But then once that system was working well and we've continued to optimize it over time, then it was like, okay. We we've got designs. How do we know we could build it? Yeah. And so then the next thing is, like, okay.
Ian Villa:We're trying to build a fan with more blades than anybody's ever proven was possible before. Who do we go to build
Christian Keil:it? Right. It took Like contract manufacturer, like, who's gonna yeah.
Ian Villa:We tried everything. I mean, like, we went to places that would 3 d print, you know, metal 3 d printing. We tried just like regular 3 d. Like, could we 3 d print using some interesting materials? Are there are there plastics with carbon fiber we could play around with?
Ian Villa:Could we see and see the thing? And ultimately, we found, like, the right combination of of vendors to be able to see and see some of these parts. Mhmm. But it's nontrivial. It it took us, like, 5 months after we had a design to actually identify the first the first shop that would even be willing to try this out for us.
Ian Villa:It was that kinda crazy of a task because even the trailing edges, like, we're talking about micron level tolerances. Yeah. And so it's like, okay. I I just need you to build me, you know, a first run of a 100 blades. Like, who are you?
Ian Villa:You're like a nobody. How do I know that this is legit? Why am I gonna spend r and d time to, like, figure out if this works? And also my my it's the middle of COVID. Yeah.
Ian Villa:My shops I don't know when my shop's gonna shut down. Like, how do I know that you're gonna even pay me?
Christian Keil:People would be surprised how hard it is to get people to take your money when you're an early startup. It's like, I want to pay you a lot of money to do this, please. But they're like, I don't know. Like, I gotta
Ian Villa:Supply chain's tough. I mean, but we that was the next big barrier. And then over time, we found more and more people willing to to build what we wanted. And we also gotten sharper about designing things Yeah. Relative to what's, you know, feasible manufacturing wise.
Christian Keil:Yeah. I think it's interesting that, so the kind of, like, maybe I don't know, like, more standard. But the the only reason it's standard is because, like, SpaceX and Tesla did it, which is just bring everything in house. Just do it all yourself. Like, do the design, which you guys have done or, like, we're doing.
Christian Keil:But then for that manufacturing, okay, now it's time to buy a CNC machine. Or, like, now it's time to buy the crazy 3 d printers or whatever it would be. Like, did you guys intend on having that as, like, from the very beginning? Like, you just you wanted to be designers. You wanted to be, you know, the people who are, like, using third party partners to manufacture a lot of the parts.
Christian Keil:Or is that still, like, is that just like a stage thing? Like, eventually, someday you'll go just manufacture everything.
Ian Villa:So, I think it's it's helpful to think about, like, what what do the big primes do today? You know, like, they don't they don't build everything in house. Like, Northrop doesn't build their wing, yeah. Skins, wing structure. They they won't necessarily do that.
Ian Villa:They'll they'll go do like a spirit or, you know, some other manufacturers and then integrate it themselves. And then, when you think about, like, early stage startup, you're you don't have, like, all the capital in the world to even Right. Bring everything in house immediately. So it's like, we knew there was a world where we could actually outsource some of the things that were easy. And also, we needed to focus on the parts and the pieces of the system that only we could design, but also were strategic for us to go manufacture.
Christian Keil:Mhmm.
Ian Villa:And so understanding that, you just have this, like, many sided Venn diagram where, okay, some of these pieces we could 3 d print. We okay. We should probably buy some, like, 3 d printers to go rapid prototype. And then, maybe we could use, like, SLA for some of these parts. But the blades themselves, like, were really tricky.
Ian Villa:So we were able to get, like, a 3 axis with an optional 4 axis c and c to go, like, prototype stuff. But, honestly, it's still, like, after playing around some more
Christian Keil:You need some more axes.
Ian Villa:We yeah. We can use some more axes. And, like, maybe maybe we aren't the ones who've had, like, the most experience to go build this out. Yeah. Let's let's see what we can get out in industry.
Ian Villa:And then over time, you know, as we've scaled the company and started to build more of these fans, we can get a lot more strategic. It's like, okay. The blades matter real a whole lot to us. Okay. We should probably bring more of that in house.
Ian Villa:Sure. Or there's other pieces of this. The composites, okay. There's a bunch of composites vendors. We don't necessarily need that.
Ian Villa:Yeah. I think over time, we'll bring more and more of the stack in where it's where it makes sense. And if there's, like, best of players in the world to team up with, we're not opposed to teaming up with them as well. You know, when you have this system, you can put them into drones. You can put them into larger aircraft.
Ian Villa:I think what's really interesting is that there's a whole new field of aviation to be unlocked, where we could fly every day or fly things every day with this technology. Even some of the systems that are flying now, you know, you imagine drone delivery still still too noisy. I mean, Google Wing has had has had, you know, blockages in in Australia because or bans in Australia because they've been so noisy. Oh, really?
Christian Keil:I didn't know that.
Ian Villa:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. They don't wanna talk about it.
Ian Villa:Right?
Christian Keil:Yeah. Fair enough.
Ian Villa:And I think, you know, it's not it's not gonna get better as we fly more unless you actually solve the problem itself. So as we start to get to, you know, more drone delivery, people wanting these services, even like medical services or drones as first responders, it's it's really critical that we have quieter, more efficient systems flying every day. Same thing too with just transportation. Right? Like, the existing air transportation system is getting clogged.
Ian Villa:We need newer aircraft to fill the roles that existing aging fleets are currently flying. We should be responsible and replacing those aircraft with, you know, more efficient, quieter systems responsible to neighborhoods. And there's a world where we're not just going to these major hubs, you know, like 70% of of the hubs in the or 70 airports. 70 airports in the United States, carry more than like 85% of the traffic. We should be able to distribute more of that.
Ian Villa:And so flying a 100 miles every day shouldn't be unheard of in, like, an electric regional jet. And so with these fans, I think not only are we replacing propulsion, but we're thinking of aircraft in new ways. Right? Distributing rather than going to 1 large fan, distributing these fans on the leading edge of a wing. Yeah.
Ian Villa:Getting blown lift, having 8 to time 8 to 10 times more lift off that wing, whether you're you're cruising or whether you're taking off.
Christian Keil:Those designs look so cool by the way. It's like, it looks so different than anything you've seen before. Part of it, because the engine is literally inside of the wing basically. It's like, it's not a thing that hangs below a wing. It is literally the wing.
Ian Villa:Yeah. You now have a component that you have freedom to integrate as opposed to, like, I've got this big engine and I gotta stick it somewhere. It's like, no. No. These can go anywhere.
Ian Villa:Your power your power train is your aircraft. Like, you can place these where you want them to to get the most out of that. And, also, by nature of being electric and flying electric, you can fly more cheaply. In fact, I I think there's a world where you can fly regionally, like San Jose to SF, and it would be cheaper than, you know, driving your car. You know, federal reimbursable rate of of driving your car today is, like, 65¢ per mile.
Ian Villa:We could do this with, like, 50¢ per mile.
Christian Keil:Cool.
Ian Villa:And and being able to enable those kinds of flights has transformative effects on the way that we live.
Christian Keil:It is interesting. I mean, the I think you would actually really like this book. The at least the first chunk of it that I that I read. The flying car one. Yeah.
Christian Keil:Yeah. Yeah. So there's, published by Stripe Press. There's this book, it's called Where's My Flying Car? And the basic the basic, premise at the beginning of the book, which I found super interesting was things just haven't changed in the past, like, since the the golden age of aviation and aerospace.
Christian Keil:Like, we had so many designs that were out there for, like, these, the the the funniest design that I saw was one that's like a normal car but then you drive into a hangar and just, like, slaps wings on the top and then that, like, can fly you around. Like, there were so many different possible designs that were out there and now there's just there's just not. I mean, we have we have the electric, like, VTOL guys who are trying to revive this as well. But there's really not, like, remarkably different ideas about air travel now than there have been recently. They're, like, as compared to what it was back in, like, 19 sixties or something.
Ian Villa:So I mean, batteries and electric motors and advances in manufacturing as well as computational design, these these are all allowing us the freedom to imagine a new world of aviation. And so I think, you know, it's early days. People are starting to figure out, like, what is what is those first manifestations. But I'd like to think that our our propulsion systems is that second gen, and that's gonna open up the world of new opportunities that are smarter, more efficient, affordable, and accessible to, you know, many more people.
Christian Keil:Hell, yeah. That's a good place as good place as any to to wrap it up. But do and place you wanna send the audience, people that you want, like, places you want them to check out, wanted to apply to to join the company. Yeah.
Ian Villa:Yeah. Yeah. We're we're hiring all the time. We're looking for for sharp talent. We're in Tennessee.
Ian Villa:Cost of living is great. Great food, great music, great people. So, definitely apply online.
Christian Keil:Oh, yeah, man. Thanks for doing this. This is awesome.
