A flying carpet, just like the one in Walt Disney’s creation ‘The Arabian Nights’ may soon be a reality. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) alumnus who is presently associated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts has come up with instructions on how to make a flying carpet. Along with his colleagues at the university, Mahadevan studied the aerodynamics of a flexible, rippling sheet moving through a fluid. Based on their study, the researchers came to the conclusion that making a carpet that would stay aloft in air may be possible. Mahadevan says that to stay afloat in air, a sheet measuring about 10 centimetres long and 0.1 millimetres thick would need to vibrate at about 10 hertz with amplitude of about 0.25 millimetres. However no such carpet will be able to ferry passengers.

The researcher says what is required for making a magic carpet is to create uplift by making ripples that push against fluids like air or water. Such rippling movements create a high pressure in the gap between a horizontal sheet and the floor, if they are close to the sheet. “As waves propagate along a flexible foil, they generate a fluid flow that leads to a pressure that lifts the foil, roughly balancing its weight,” Nature magazine quoted Mahadevan as saying. According to him, the ripples could not only lift the foil but drive it forward also, a trait required by any respectable magic carpet.
Via - ANI (Sub reqd)