This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Vires Aeronautics is reinventing the wing. "It's the first real innovation in aerospace since something as basic as the flap," says Jordan Greene, president and cofounder of the Silicon Valley startup. Greene founded Vires in 2012, with Zach Hargreaves and Harshil Goel, who met at the University of California, Berkeley. "We wanted to re-engineer what's been done and see if we could come up with a different solution," says Greene.
Hargreaves had been interested in flight for a while, working on swarms of robots at Harvard; Greene was studying business; Goel was a mathematician. Goel went through the equations that underpinned flight, trying to see if they could be manipulated. One, the no slip-condition, caught his attention. This stipulates that the molecules of air that touch a plane's wing at the point of contact have zero velocity compared to the wing itself: effectively, they stick to it. By increasing the number of points of contacts on a wing, more lift should be generated. Greene says that the technology applies to "anything with an object moving through a fluid -- ships, turbines, anything".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
