Photo credit: WILL KIRK / JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Engineering students from John Hopkins University have developed an innovative silencer for Black & Decker leaf blowers. To start, the team first spent months dissecting the leaf blower piece by piece and analyzing all of its noises and why it makes them.
They then spent additional months brainstorming possible improvements, refining some ideas, and tossing even more. After 40 prototypes, they finally settled on: an attachment that muffles the machine’s noise, just like a silencer on a gun. This device basically dampens the sound as it leaves, but keeps all the force.
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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. We are stoked and super, super proud,” said Michael Chacon, team member, who like the rest of the four-member team is a senior majoring in mechanical engineering.
