This is a terrible misleading title. It absolutely has moving parts, it’s just using piezoelectric materials and compliant mechanisms to drive the moving parts rather than the more traditional electromagnets and gears.
You can do without moving parts entirely if you can move air by other means, which pretty much means just ionizing air and then using electric fields to accelerate it
That’s actually what I thought this was about at first which if it had been would be pretty big as I’m not aware of any ion thruster that’s useful for in atmosphere operation. Sadly this is not that.
Yup. Plasma channel plays a lot with them. They’re a great concept. But way hard to harness properly.
Flapping is moving…
Still neat, but terrible headline.
Aerospace engineers demonstrate how electricity alone can drive flapping flight.
Really odd way to say they’re using piezo actuators. Does the author think that motors and the like on a device of this scale aren’t electrically actuated?
