Why Spiderman sucks
June 18th, 2012
Kidding – we don’t really think that Spiderman sucks. It’s just that recently our favourite sucking device has been used to help people scale walls like a superhero.
One of the home’s more neglected appliances has come up trumps in an US Air Force sponsored competition. It asked groups of engineering students from 17 universities to come up with a design that would allow a four-man team to scale a building or mountain without the use of grappling hooks.
The not so stealth winner was a contraption made from a noisy, but super-powerful vacuum cleaner and battery-filled ice cream bucket by a group from the University of Utah.
The students, who now go by the name the Ascending Aggies, used vacuum suction pads and a vacuum backpack where each side could pull 4.5 psi of force.
“To power it, we’ve got batteries in an ice cream bucket,” team member Steven Daniels told Deseret News.
“When we got to climbing and seeing it work, that was really exciting,” Daniels said.
“It’s almost like the motion of climbing a ladder,” mechanical engineering student Garrett Vaughan said, “or if you wanna talk superheroes, maybe you can consider Spider-Man.”
Intended for special force personnel the system is supposed to weigh less than 9 kilogrammes, but ideally 2 kilogrammes. The Air Force have granted the team $50,000 to continue working on their invention and also enable them to secure a $100,000 grant for a more finished product.
This is not the first time appliances have been linked with superheros, as our top dog blogger Mark Bristow has already highlighted in this post: Appliances Assemble: creating a kitchen super-team.
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