Coanda Effect Drone Propulsion

right so check this out I have a fan mounted inside of a duct here and a fog machine mounted behind it and what I can do is I can blow air through the fan and we should get a stream of smoke coming out of this nozzle now I'll give you a quick demo I should be able to deflect the air a bit with this piece of foam so let's spin it up okay so hopefully you could see the smoke getting deflected by that piece of foam but watch what happens when I used a curved surface and put it near to the stream of air [Applause] you should be able to visibly see the air being pulled downwards around the outside of the curve and this is due to an effect called eco and ER effect this video sponsored by Wix go to Wix calm /go Ford / Tom Stanton to build your free website today so what is the commander effect when air or any other fluid exits a nozzle at high velocity it will pull surrounding molecules with it as it disperses into the stationary surrounding air but when a surface is placed near to the flow the air between the surface and the fast flow is dragged along with it this causes the low-pressure zone between the fast-moving air and the surface and the surrounding atmospheric air above it will push down on the flow attaching it to the curved surface so you might be wondering how am I going to use this Coanda effect to produce the rust and lift a drone off the ground well if you search Coanda effect drone into Google you'll see many results that look like flying saucers and initially it seems as though there's a center propeller that blows air directly downwards to produce lift but in fact there is no hole through the center of these flying saucer type drones instead the airflow from the propeller flows on the outside of the dome and follows the outside of the curve due to the commander effect now these things are pretty cool but I don't really see much point in putting a bowl-shaped dome underneath a propeller you may as well just have the F and the propeller flow directly downwards so instead of using a propeller I want to use an impeller which will basically blow air directly outwards horizontally in a disc and you see kuranda effect to then follow the outside of the curve of the dome so let's 3d print some impellers since I have no idea what kind of impeller would be most suited for a propeller replacement I printed many different types to test some couldn't handle the RPM of the motor and some were too much for the motor to handle I finally settled on this design as it was relatively close to the drone propeller in terms of current draw the next step is to make the curve dome notes will be mounted under the impeller to deflect the air downwards for lift now I'm going to 3d print the dome because it's the quickest and cheapest solution to me at this point in time in order to make the 3d print as lightweight as possible it'll need to be hollow but it's almost impossible to print this on a regular FDM 3d printer due to the huge overhang in the center and even with support material it'll be very difficult to print with such a thin layer so I've printed this test dome in two pieces and weighing in at 83 grams plus the layer lines being perpendicular to the airflow it wasn't ideal so my next plan was to cut the dome into slices like a cake that way I could 3d print the dome in eight pieces and attach that to a center hub this saved quite a bit of weight and I'm not sure it could be much lighter using a 3d printing technique the next step was to mount the motor and impeller to the dome and see if the air really does get directed downwards due to the condor effect and it looked surprisingly hopeful then I set up a thrust test and with a conventional drone motor and propeller to get some control data this setup produced 10.28 newtons of thrust while drawing 346 watts I've been replaced the propeller with the impeller and attached it to the dome this produced 1.84 newtons of thrust whilst drawing 324 watts which is extremely disappointing but at least it looks awesome in slow motion so let's get on with the build repeating the dome construction and over three more times wasn't very enjoyable with all the CA glue fumes but at least I didn't choose to use lightweight carbon fiber tubes for the arms which would require a cutting and making carbon fiber depth on top of that I recycled the motors from a working drone to build this thing once the arms were attached to the domes and laid out like the quadcopter shape it was designed to be it looked like a formation of Chinese lanterns or a few salad bowls with the electronics installed and the motor soldered up it was time to fit the impellers and see if this thing will fly okay here we go first test of the Condor effect drone [Music] I kind of worked it needs full throttle to go up the ground so I'm worried about the motors overheating [Music] [Music] one of the impellers is loose on the motor so I'm going to go and tighten that up as well as let the motors cool down a little bit that was a very short flight but I have a feeling they're going to get quite warm because I was at full throttle just then just to get it off the ground [Music] so the drone does fly but it's not great the all up weight of the drone is 890 grams and it's only capable of producing about 750 grams of thrust so it's only able to hover in ground effect at full throttle which heats up the motors very quickly I then decided to try a different impeller designs with no luck including this weird design which kept the motors cooler but didn't increase the thrust at all I then tried reducing the weight by flying with the battery on an extension wire [Music] but again it still struggled to get out of ground effect [Music] so I think those few test flights went pretty well it proves that you can use the karana effect to deflect a horizontal airflow down vertically to produce lift to lift up a drone however it is incredibly inefficient no matter what I did to this thing it just wouldn't get out of ground effect even without the weight of the battery and all sorts of impeller designs I've gone through I don't even know how many impellers so many different impeller there's still a pile over there different angled blades different height different diameters different number of blades no matter what I do it just doesn't have enough thrust so I think as a last-ditch attempt to get this thing to fly still using the Condor effect but just getting rid of these impellers is I'm going to use conventional drone propellers I'll need to raise the motors up a little bit and put some kind of scoop to scoop the air from the propeller outwards and then hopefully it will still use the Condor effect to pull the air downwards by just using a slightly more efficient form of producing thrust all the motors were disordered and removed from their mounts and bolted to a 3d printed extension once reattached to the original motor mounts they were raised slightly to allow the propeller airflow to flow out sideways they were all then resold back up and ready for another test flight right here we go last attempt with conventional propellers sad so spoon [Music] [Music] so still using the condor effect but it flies Mars better it takes off about half throttle I'm so pleased and pleased but also annoyed that my impellers didn't work very well [Music] it may seem as though this is now just a regular drone with a few large tomato things mounted below it but it is in fact producing lift due to the kuranda effect the diameter of the domes are far larger than the propellers and therefore the thrust can only flow around the curved surfaces one thing I noticed after a couple of flights is a strong ground effect on the craft a conventional drone experiences a ground effect but I've never flown a drone that floats around on such a cushion of air it's able to fly out of ground effect but requires quite a bit more power consumption as well as getting buffeted around in the wind [Music] [Music] while stars doing research for this project I read somewhere that apparently using the Condor effect to direct to drones airflow downwards to produce lift actually increases the efficiency of the drone which after carrying out this project I struggle to believe however the theory is that the fast-moving air over the top of the dome is at lower pressure than the airflow or the stationary air underneath the dome and this pushes up on the drone in a similar way that the difference in pressure above and below an aircraft wing works now this may be possible if you had a really efficient propulsion system like a really efficiently designed impeller and also possibly different sized domes if you increase the diameter of the dome you will increase the surface area which will make the effect of that pressure difference greater so it will push up a bit more also I assume you would have to compare it to a drone of a similar weight so that the weight of the domes are negligible because if I were to take these domes off the drone would be so much lighter even if I manufactured these using vacuum forming technique or carbon fiber or something like that the added mass would still decrease the efficiency I assume of the drone also the flight characteristics in high winds or high speed would probably be a nightmare with this thing it's not the most aerodynamic thing I was really impressed with the ground effect that this drone experienced there's a really strong cushion of air that it floats on and I'm what I'm wondering about that is whether the airflow that comes around the top of the dome with the conventional drone as the airflow hits the ground it spreads outwards but with this I wonder whether some of it goes underneath the dome and almost like pressurizes underneath I'm not sure exactly how whether that does work but the cushion of air that it floats around on ground effect is really strong it would be interesting to see if this could be modified into almost like ground effect hovercraft her a commander effect ground effect hovercraft and also see whether that still requires gyros for stabilization as hovercrafts don't require active stabilization they just sit on a cushion of air above the ground speaking of natural stability I recently made a website about whether having a battery on a droid higher or lower increases or decreases its stability I built the website using Wix which is a free platform that allows you to build highly customizable professional and robust websites you can use the advanced drag and drop tools to create an information packed smart looking website plus Wix takes care of all the heavy lifting like reliable hosting custom domains email marketing and more so you can focus on your creativity its wide range of professional templates are customizable to fit your creative needs whether you are a novice business owner or advanced designer Wix is for you so go to Wix calm /go forward slash Tom Stanton to build a free website today or sign up for a premium plan to get more bandwidth more storage a custom URL and more so thanks to Wix for sponsoring this video so there we have it a drone that uses the Condor effects full propulsion it's a bit of a disappointment that these impellers didn't work better than I thought they would I really wanted to get this thing to fly properly and then compare the efficiency to a conventional drone however halfway through the project I realized that there is just no way this is even comparable to the efficiency of a conventional drone the efficiency is terrible but I did learn a lot and I definitely want to explore the ground effect think a bit more if you enjoyed this video it'd be great if you could leave a thumbs up down below if you're new to my channel and want to see other crazy drone projects then click subscribe down below I'd like to thank my patrons for supporting me over on patreon comm you guys make these projects possible so thank you very much for your support and I'll see you in the next project goodbye

Channel: Tom Stanton

Views: 2,176,532

Rating: 4.8290434 out of 5

Keywords: Coanda effect, coanda, Coandă effect, drone, Propulsion, thrust, lift, fluid dynamics, DIY, homemade, aircraft, engineer, engineering, science, physics, how does the coanda effect work, Henri Coanda, VTOL, Experiment, Coandă effect explained, ground effect, downwash effect, aerodynamics

Id: Irp_vnmUWZ4

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019