Consumer-based small unmanned aircraft systems (sUASs) or drone products with a useful load less than 55 lbf use variable-speed rotormotor configurations to provide aircraft thrust and maneuverability. The success of these quadcopter-type platforms makes them desirable to scale into larger UAS groups. However, the feasibility of these variable-speed configurations is unknown in the commercial/military UAS design space between 100 and 1,000 lbf of useful load. As the size of the rotormotor configurations increases, so does their inertia. It is unclear what the effects of increased inertia are on the transient settling time of the rotormotor system. A vertical-take-off-and-landing propulsion experiment stand was constructed to characterize the transient performance of various configurations. Inertia has an effect on transient coast-down settling time of a rotormotor. However, inertia is not the only contributor to the settling time. A stochastic model was generated from the experimental data to predict coast-down settling time as a function of significant parameters. Temperature and thermal management proved to be significant items and must be addressed when using electrical motors for large rotary-wing applications. While the results presented are significant, more-expansive experiments are required to adequately predict the transient response of larger systems.
Unmanned Vertical Take off and Landing (VTOL) Propulsion: Scalability of Quadcopter RotorMotor Configurations Outside the Small UAS (sUAS) Regime
2020
46 pages
Report
No indication
English
European Patent Office | 2019
|VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)
European Patent Office | 2015
|Propulsion system and aircraft with vertical take-off and landing-VTOL
European Patent Office | 2022
|Centrifugal fans for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft propulsion
European Patent Office | 2022
|