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Bio-inspired Kite
A load-bearing, yet durable, kite inspired by insect wings
Education
Creative Commons Attribution
You can adapt, share or use this work commercially as long as you attribute the creator.
Description
Kites can best fly in winds about 10 km/h. Any wind near or above 20 km/h is strong enough to break most of the conventional kites. This is a reason that explains why broken kites can often be found in a kite-flying spot. Here, inspired by insect wings, we designed and 3D printed kites that can fly, and successfully survive, in strong wind speeds of about 80 km/h. The bio-inspired design allowed us to combine two characteristics which are often mutually exclusive: loading-bearing and durability. Our developed design principle could give rise to a universal paradigm for developing load-bearing, yet durable, engineering structures.
You can find our article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2020.109354
Materials and methods
- This kite was 3D printed using a Prusa 3D printer with PLA.
- When you open the STL file, the model needs to be scaled 10 times for a building plate of 20*25 cm
- You need to rotate the model a bit to fit it into the plate as it is shown in the attached image (orientation in the slicer)
- You need to set the brim (skirt) to zero so that it wouldn't be out of the building plate.
- After print you just need to attach some lightweight tails, thread and rubber band as it is illustrated in the attached video file (instructional guide). You can also watch the assembly instruction on YouTube: https://youtu.be/D-B58RW855E
- That's it. Now, you just need to go the beach and fly the kite in the wind :-)
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Comments
geraldine added this to the Toys & Stuff collection ago
Adrin added this to the interesting designs collection ago
anais added this to the idées FABLAB collection ago
Ali Khaheshi printed this ago
- Printed on:
- prusa
Ali Khaheshi published this design ago