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BRUSHLESS QUAD COPTER SERIES
Test data such as thrust, torque, RPM, power, efficiency and more is collected using one of our propulsion test stands, and for this drone the RCbenchmark Series 1580 would likely be the best fit.įor our candidates, data from the database tells us that all three propellers reach our hover thrust of 3.1 N, but only the 6040R King Kong nears the maximum thrust of 6.2 N (0.63 kgf) (figure 4).įigure 4: Thrust performance of the propeller candidates We can learn about our three propeller candidates by looking through the RCbenchmark database of electric motors, propellers and ESCs. We will work with the assumption that our drone frame is set and we cannot exceed 6” in diameter for our propellers. To review, we have three propellers in our list of candidates: We would also like to achieve at least double that thrust to have a good control authority, so we will be looking for the propeller that is most efficient at 3.1 N, but can also achieve up to 6.2 N of thrust. We will therefore need to produce at least 12.5 N of thrust for the drone to hover (1.277 kg * 9.81), just over 3.1 N per propeller. Assuming all of our other components stay the same at 622 g, the total mass of our drone is now 1,277 g. This new battery weighs a whopping 655 g compared to our old battery that weighed just 155 g. The Turnigy 5000mAh 6S LiPo pack nicely fits our criteria with 111 Wh of capacity (figure 3).įigure 3: Turnigy 5000 mAh/ 111 Wh LiPo battery (Photo: HobbyKing)
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For this reason, we will start by swapping our old battery with a new battery that has around 100 - 125 Wh of capacity in order to increase our flight time. Up to the 0.2 hour mark there is an increase in flight time with increased battery capacity, but after about 100 - 125 Wh the marginal gains become less significant. Iteration 2: Choosing a New Battery for Maximum Flight Time This is where the design loop begins, as we swap components to try and build the drone that best meets our needs. If we increased the battery capacity, we could also increase our flight time, but the trade off would be increased weight. The battery’s capacity is just over 19.2 Wh (14.8 V * 1.3 Ah = 19.2 Wh), which occurs within the growth phase of the graph and gives us only about 4.5 minutes of flight time. We presumed our design would include a Turnigy nano-tech 1300 mAh 4S battery and included its mass in our overall calculations. battery capacity for the original drone design In our previous article, we modelled the flight time of our drone with varying battery capacity (figure 2).įigure 2: Flight time vs. Our goal is to maximize our drone’s flight time so that it can hover as long as possible.
BRUSHLESS QUAD COPTER HOW TO
In our previous article, How to Increase a Drone's Flight Time and Lift Capacity, we covered the first stage of the design process and reached a first version of our design. Figure 1: The drone design loop illustrated