Could this Thruster transform Aviation?

foreign thanks for clicking on this video for those of you who don't know me my name's Peter and it's been about a year and a half since I made a video so I guess I'm probably pretty Rusty at this anyway this is the project I've been working on here for almost two years I started the design of this back in March of 2021 and did a bunch of cfd modeling on it to come up with the with the dimensions and how everything works and basically what we have is a cordless Thruster we'll call a stucted fan that's driven by electric motor which is integrated in the coils and magnets are integrated in behind the rotor here and I also have the design sort of also has the ability to have the blades with variable pitch in there so it can be changed while it's running so it gives you an advantage over a turbo fan and as you'll see I'm going to take you through this video and show you all the different aspects of this and you'll see why this is potentially going to be a bit of a game changer in aviation so let's go and jump right in and then after that when I'm all done you guys can leave some comments on this video and let me know what you think and if you have any questions let me know for sure and I'll try and answer them as best I can thanks okay so this is what it looks like in the cad and with the cowling visible so let me give you some basic um information on this so the interior diameter here from the inside of the cowling on the bottom to the top is 24 inches and there's 18 blades in here and they're each seven inches long with a cord length of about one inch and as I mentioned before there's quite a lot of time I spent iterating through this to come up with what seemed like the optimal um you know configuration of this based upon you know what the cfd was telling me as I was doing simulations on each different variation that I sort of came up with and as you can see we've got ventilation in the front here which I'll talk about a little bit more uh later on but let's move on and see how it looks with the cowling off so this is how it looks with the cowling hidden and just to give you the basics of how it works so the this blue or purple here that's the rotor and the rotor is a quarter inch thick aluminum and that's riding on these wheels so there's a dozen Wheels around the front and there's a nine around the back and they are basically one of these wheels here and they have a bearing on either side or up or an upper one and a lower one and that's taking all the driving load um from from the rotor itself and then mount it to the rotor each of the blades has a bracket that it sits on and they can pivot on that and I'll show you that in a minute and on the back side here we have other Wheels other here that the rotor runs on and we also have these other fittings or other brackets in here that allow the blades to be adjusted and I'll show you that in a minute okay so here is the rotor and this is everything that's spinning I've hidden most of the blades here to show you so I can show you this one actuating but before I do that on the outside you'll see the way I designed this and this may not be ideal as I don't know a lot about or at the time didn't know a lot about the best way to configure an electric motor but these are all the magnets here so they alternate north south facing inwards and there's 72 on either side so there's 144 magnets and the blue thing there that's the bracket and the silver one that's the actual magnet itself and the coils run in between that and just to give you an idea here I'll show you this this is one of the coils in there with a the bracket that mounts it to the housing so that doesn't rotate that just basically sits still in the housing so and obviously there's a tight clearance there and there's a little um soft iron core in there you know for the electromagnet and it's just a three-phase motor set up there with every other uh every third one there being on the same phase so how the blade actuation works for the pitch adjustment you'll see you've got this orange bracket in here which is running on these bronze bearings so it can slide and when it slides forwards like this it actuates the blade and you slide it backwards and it comes back so normally the blade is where as you can see the blade rotates under on a bearing quite a large flat bearing that's underneath here and it's sort of in line with the Leading Edge of this of the blade so it rotates around the Leading Edge and there's a little roll of bearing on the back back here to allow this to roll on that flat surface there so again if I uh actuate this you'll see that's how we get the blades to move and to actuate him you're pushing pressure here but then it's the aerodynamic force on the blade when it's running that's going to pull it back to the flat pitch so this is just to hold it in place and when you let go of this it'll want to flatten out just because of the aerodynamic force on it and where the um you know where the center of pivot is on the Leading Edge there So and I've got 25 degrees of adjustment in there right now and then this orange thing here this is actuated by this other ring that's on the main on the main housing and I'll go back and I'll show you that here shortly all right something you may have picked up already is that given that the coils and the magnets are on the outer side of the whole rotor they have quite a long arm length from the center of rotation it's about 13 inches of radius and so the amount of torque um available will be really quite high on this setup because of that arm length and because obviously electric motor has a lot of torque just by its own nature um so that's definitely a plus and so let me show you how this uh the blades get actuated here so you have this other outer ring here and it's basically slotted and the slots run on an angle and it has wheels on it here that have a flat Edge and they ride up against the flat edge of this orange one here so while that rotor is spinning these wheels here are turning and running against the orange one and in order to get that orange that orange bracket there on the rotor to push forward this one just rotates so if I'll I'll move it and you'll see it as it rotates it moves forward and because of the way I've got the animation set up it's not pushing the orange rotor right now or that orange bracket right now but you can see how the wheels there are like overlapping now where you know it would be so if I move it back there you'll see how it comes comes back again there so that's that's how that works in order to get the blades to change pitch and in order to actuate that right now for the design I just have a lead screw in here and so that pushes along here uh you know controlled by a just a regular stepper motor and that runs this Rod here pushes this right along and that right is sort of hard fixed to the orange um or the light orange yellow one there and so that allows it to rotate so that's how you get the pitch adjustment so this the pitch adjustment on the blades would be fully automated and uh just control electronically and it would work in that if the blades or if the motor is spinning too quickly with not enough load then it would just basically course up the blades to you know add more pitch and if it's struggling or if it's laboring under whatever it's trying to do it would just flatten them out again very much the same way as a governor works on a regular propeller so on a constant speed propeller so that's how that system all sets up so unlike a regular ducted fan motors that exist because this has a variable pitch blades on it it's not going to have the same problem of running out of steam when it gets to sort of fast incoming air speeds or you know fast cruising speeds the blades can adjust further and you know if we needed to we could actually take this Beyond 25 degrees but I think that'll probably be enough um so um yeah let me tell you some of the other advantages of this design so having the blades mounted on the outside of the rotor it gives you the advantage that nothing is under stress everything's under compression so when those blades are spinning they're all wanting to be pushed down into the rotor it's unlikely that one of them is going to come loose or come free because of that which is an advantage and then um the advantage of this system as I mentioned earlier over a turbofan is that that you can adjust the blade angle so on a turbo fan they're pretty much designed the blade pictures are set for their maximum cruise and you don't have that ability to adjust them dynamically and we don't need to be concerned with blade tip speeds because the tips are so close to the center there they're not moving very fast at all and that's why as I said earlier this thing is designed to run at 5600 RPM and if you could get bearings that are inside those Wheels there that the rotors are running onto to handle the faster speeds you'd be able to run this thing up to like 8 000 RPM of course there'd be a lot more loads and stuff and I've the FEA that I did on this for the Prototype was all done for a 5600 RPM so um but I when I did all the cfd modeling and stuff I actually did take this up and and run some um some cfd simulations all the way up to a 96 inch diameter and I'll give you some numbers on that a little bit later but as you can see there's no reason why this wouldn't scale up to a much larger diameter yeah with the cowling visible again I just want to point out a couple other things so the stator is in here as you can see at the back there's nine of these Staters and their job is to take the swirling air that's coming off the back of the blades and straighten it back out again so it comes out the back you know in the same angle as that you know direction of travel and you can see obviously I've set them up as an airfoil and you'll see later when I show you in the simulation that they actually generate forward thrust because um you know the the camber of that airfoil has enough there that when the air is running over the top of it there and because it's also pitched downward um in relative to the direction of motion there's a the component of lift that acts in the forward Direction actually provides forward thrust for the whole thruster so they actually contribute about 15 of the total thrust just having those in there and I spent quite a lot of time uh going through different iterations of the size of those and the chord lengths and the foil and all that sort of stuff to match some up to what the flow was coming off there and also you can see you've got ventilation in the cowling here and that's to allow the air to run in past the coils there to keep them cool and obviously it runs in the front here through these slots and underneath the rotor past the coils and then back out the other side so that's how that works and then one of the other advantages of this design if for some reason you did bend a blade or break a blade or something like that um during a trip or whatever it would be easy enough to come in here and you'll see I've designed it so these screws here that all have a hex head bolt on them you just take those three screws out there and the blade rotates a little bit and you can just pull it out and you can hot swap it and put a new one in so you don't have to like do a full disassemble if you've damaged a blade it's actually like a five minute job to do that there's a couple other things I just like to point out before we move on uh one of them is the one of the big advantages of having this and being electric is unlike a turbo fan it's not pouring a whole bunch of waste heat out the back which you know all that jet fuel goes to burn there's so much of it that just ends up getting converted into heat and blown out the back which is such a waste of energy uh so this is definitely has an advantage over that uh setup and last thing I wanted to point out so anybody who's looking at this who's really astute about aerodynamics would realize that this isn't a good design for the where the cowling meets up to whatever surface this is mounted to I ended up just trying this because it looked kind of cool but what ended up happening was the airflow here has accelerated right here in front of the blades the lower blades and that would create like a pressure differential where it was a lot more pressure on the blades here than would be up the top so I actually added this and this hasn't been finished yet but basically a lip similar to what you know most other turbo fans would have on there and this way the air coming in would be even pressure all the way around and any air that could be accelerated coming off a wing or wherever this was mounted would just go around here below that and actually you know did some cfd modeling on that that moves the air pretty smooth and you get nice even flow in there and it looks kind of different but and as I say it hasn't been Blended in yet it's just a surface I created there so anyway that fixes that potential issue ahead of time before I move on and show you how I did the cfd modeling in simscale I want to show you the model that I exported out of here which you know which this is actually before I did all the detailed you know mechanical design so it's a much simpler model that just basically has all the aerodynamic surfaces in it and you've got it translucent right now so you can see all the parts that make it up but basically um importing into SIM scale you import like a solid block that has um cavities where everything is so if I make this sort of solid again and then if I do a cut on here section view you'll be able to see and how it's sort of working so now we're looking into the inside of the cowling there and obviously the Hat the yellow hash here is solid material and so if we sort of go through you can see the profile of that of the cowling and then you can see the stator is here as they're being cut As you move through and then you can see each of the blades as I basically move the Cutaway all the way around the model so that's that's how you import it and there's also this um a section in here which is a rotating section which encompasses where the blades are moving and I did one of these for uh this model and I also did one of these for uh two bladed propeller for 82 inch blade propeller just to sort of get a Baseline and I'll make this model available to other people so if they want to run their own simulations to see what sort of results they can get or what sort of performance that they can get out of it they're more than welcome to do that so the first thing I did in simscale was I wanted to establish like a baseline just to make sure that it was giving me some reasonable results and so this particular model here that you can see has a two bladed propeller in there and I've got it at 82 inches and unfortunately all the simulations that I ran this was you know almost two years ago now magically disappeared out of my account in Sim scale um only a couple weeks ago so I've had to rerun some of the stuff and I haven't been able to get this propeller one to come up with exactly the same numbers that I did before but the numbers I got before was um 979 pounds of thrust for a 195 horsepower which I was sort of at an 82 inch prop sort of like a older 182 with a two-bladed prop um somewhere in that category and I was actually looking this up online to see if people have done some calculations and this is actually about a 172 here and someone did this and they've got numbers in here showing and this is in kilo so um 220 kilos multiplied by 2.2 you're in the sort of 500 and something pounds of thrust here at uh 2400 RPM and when I did the this propeller thing I was doing this at uh 2800 RPM so really pushing it and I remember when I did the Raptor um that had I think around about 320 horsepower and with the five blader prop it was I measured it at a thousand pounds of thrust so I think 900 pounds of thrust here 200 horsepower is probably you know reasonable in terms of a baseline but anyway that's what the that's what the code was showing and you can actually look at these runs here if I show you this um you can see this black line here is the amount of force which is the propulsion force in other words the air being pushed backwards that's 3000 Newtons and down here on this line is uh the torque so that's 577 newton meters of torque and I've you know put all this into a spreadsheet and done all the calculations and we can kind of show you a little bit up in here how I've been doing it all basically just to do my comparison so this is the this is the one that I had before here 979 for the two blader prop and 195 horsepower anyway so let's move on and look at how I did the Thruster here so here's the Thruster model as you can see like I just showed you before in on shape and there's the rotating region in there which this encompasses where the blades are so you import that into a Sim scale here and then you go and you know create your simulation here so I'm doing a compressible simulation I select my geometry which is you know this one that we're looking at here um and then you specify what your materials are which is basically air you can set your initial conditions and I really don't do much of that I just set everything to standard and then you can Define your pressure Inlet area and there's different ways of doing this but I've done it with a pressure Inlet on the front a pressure Outlet on the back and then walls around the side and that's how I'm defining the the working box that everything is working in and then you've got this uh rotating region in here which you define which is the it basically looks at the geometry of the blades and it sets those to rotating and I've got those rotating on a scale here so that we iterate through 1500 time units and I have it starting out at zero radians a second and it works up to 586 radians a second which is 5600 RPM so that's how the it sort of progressively goes up to that and then it sort of sits there from from time unit uh number 600 all the way through to 1500 so it can stabilize and then you can specify details in the simulation how many time units and how often you write the data or the results and stuff and then I've got in here the last thing just specifying the forces and moments on each of the blades there the Staters and also on the housing and you run your simulation and you get your results out here so if I open up these I can look at the force plots here so starting out here this would be the forces on the rotor and you see we're native here just because of the orientation of this basically as it's starting up um it's creating you know quite a lot of force uh on on the blades themselves and then it once it hits the peak RPM it sort of stabilizes there and gets to point where it's just going to be comfortable so we've got 574 Newtons there and the torque on there was a 79 Newtons or newton meters sorry so that's this is how I'm getting the numbers for you know how much um basically I'm getting the numbers for the talk but in order to get the numbers for um how much flow there is there I look at the solution Fields here so I'll come back let this load up and then we'll come back and show you how it all looks okay so as I mentioned I haven't been able to come up with exactly the same simulation numbers as before but I'm pretty close I just can't remember exactly what specific settings I had last time when I originally done all this couple years ago I actually ended up doing about 167 simulations or 164 simulations on this iterations where I was just changing one thing at a time and if it was if it made an improvement I kept it and if it didn't and I reversed it and then went on to the next aspect so until I got it tweaked in that's what gave me all the decisions on you know how many blades and and lengths of blades and cord links and all the different angles and perspectives and and things like the Staters and the cowling shape and everything like that and that's how I basically came to you know the results that I've Got to Now so looking at this now so this is basically the box that we're in and I've got the front side of it hidden or the front wall of it hidden so you can see in there I'm going to change it a little bit in a second so you can see more about what's going on but I wanted to show you how on the back side here I've got this one face selected here and over here I can get what the a volumetric flow radius is so 17.8 cubic meters per second and I've got that you know put in my spreadsheet so this is a new one here this one I'm working on here 17.8 so but before when I did it I had 18.6 so not far off but that 18.6 was 114 newton meters of torque and now I'm only 79 newton meters of torque so um and then of course this is the amount of pressure that's on the blades and I have a feeling that because of the way this uh works with the entrainment with the hole in the middle that you're getting a free ride with a lot of air that's going through the middle there it doesn't have to actually touch the blade so you're not actually putting force and pressure against the blades but you are getting flow rate because of it because of sort of like a acting like a drain with the entrainment effect anyway so the numbers come fairly close here I had 15 75 pounds of thrust before for 90 horsepower and if you compare that to what I had on the two blader prop 979 pounds with 195 horsepower if you take those two ratios and just you know one over the other times one over the other you end up with this number here so the performance on the Thruster is about three and a half times what it is for the two blader propeller in terms of how much thrust it does for how much horsepower how much torque is required given that the RPMs are a lot higher uh anyway so it's you know it's a lot it's a lot better than a two-bladed propeller in terms of efficiency so anyway let me rearrange this and then I'll show you how it looks like with some animations all right so I changed the color here of the housing and the boxes in just so we hope we have a bit of a better contrast here so let me show you this animation here so what this is is basically particles and I've got them starting out they start out in this one section of the front of the box here and then they're just running through and they're showing you the velocity of the flow running through the Thruster there so you can see they're coming in and that this isn't um the way I got that face set up there is just pressure input so just atmospheric pressure and the movement from this is all being actually instigated by the the suction effect of the Thruster here so that air would normally be moving at zero when it starts out in fact you can go and change this back to the starting point here starting point of the simulation at zero and we should see that update yeah so there's there's the flow just starting out as it's starting to work up to the first speed actually yeah that should be yeah so that's that's a zero when we haven't even got any speed yet we go to the first um time unit there first hundred time units there we're starting to get up to speed so that's a hundred uh radians a second and once that loads you'll see that start to move there sort of somewhat slowly but you get the idea and so that's at 180 ends a second you can see it obviously the blades don't move in this simulation but when they when all the calculations are happening they're taking that into account that they're moving that's what that rotating region is for and you can see how the air hitting the blades is being turned um you know backwards zero or rotate rotating around in the direction of the blades traveling so we've got a half cutaway now the blades would be going around in this direction anti-clockwise and so the flow coming off of those is now a diagonal Direction across that flat surface there and now the job of the state is is to straighten that out so they're not doing very much when it's going slow like this um but if I bring it up bring the speed up you'll see how it changes so we'll go up to basically once it's all stabilized here at the very end 1500 time units and you'll see the extra speed and stuff that there's there or the extra velocity on the airflow and of course the color changes depending on the speed or the velocity so the lighter colors means faster velocity I'm loading that up here we go so now you can see already that the areas are moving a lot quicker just because of the color and so the light the light green color there is the fastest speed moving through there and now if I sort of tilt this so you can catch how that stator looks you can see that the is hitting the stator pretty good speed there and it's actually accelerating across that curved upper well it's lower surface right now but the curved surface of the status is faster around there than it is on the other side so I've got the angles on those pretty good and possibly have a little bit more uh angle on there maybe a little bit more clockwise from what the camera is right now but you get the idea so I did lots and lots of iterations like this just to make sure everything was smooth and there wasn't any Eddies in there or anything like that and of course you know you can look at this um by the excuse me you can look at this just by looking at the um a cutting plane here and see what it's doing at any given point so if we just cut it at the Midway Point here this this will show you the colors um based upon you know the velocities again so just going through the blades and now this is just at the halfway point there and you can also turn on here these vectors that show you what the flow is like and of course the bigger the arrows are the faster the flow is and uh also too the arrows go in and out of that of that cutting plane so the ones that are poking out right now you can just see them a little bit it means it's coming backwards towards the camera and then if you just see the Trails of them there then it means it's going in the other direction so you can see the stator is having an effect on that one it's making it uh turn back inwards again anyway so you can see the flow going on there and you know very much the same as what a turbo fan is but you know the advantages that we have here and I haven't even done any real work with adjusting the blade angles I've just got them in the in the basic in the flat pitch um in flat pitch position I did do some original simulations at 150 knots of oncoming AirSpeed like you know on an airplane that was doing 150 knots indicated and I did change the blade angles a little bit there just to compensate for it and I'm still getting positive Thrust out of there it wasn't like I'd sort of run out of steam and wasn't getting any net thrust so uh the blade pitch is doing what it's supposed to do there and uh you know compensating for the forward um forward motion of the whole setup so and you can actually see the entrainment effect going on in here where you know the the air in the middle here this is faster air here than it is out here so this sort of opening in the middle in here is is actually pulling air through and it slows down through here but I think a lot of it is just because there's so much acceleration coming off the blades and the stator is here but in the middle here you know you are getting a lot more air moving through whereas you know on a turbo fan there'd be a big engine section in the middle here that is just stopping all that so you're only able to move your air through where all the blades are and as I said before I think this area in here in this in the center isn't having having to do too much work with moving the air through there it's just nothing that's really hitting anything it's just a low pressure out the back here and a high pressure out the front here and it's just pushing it through or pulling it through um so anyway that's uh that I think that pretty much covers everything think if there's anything more for to show you about on the simulations here all right so I did want to take a couple minutes here just to give you the back story on how with going through these simulations when I was first doing them so when I started out the model that I came up with for this was pretty rough and uh you know when I ran the first simulations on it because of you know all the geometry of it it was actually worse than the two blade propeller I started out I was at only about 80 percent of the efficiency of the two-blade propeller and then of course I started tweaking everything and changing everything and just you know one iteration after the other and eventually well it didn't take me long and actually I got to one to one with the propeller and then I just kept going and the changes that I made were just making small improvements all the way along I got to 1.2 1.3 1.4 and then you know ultimately to two times the efficiency of the propeller and there was never a big change that I made that made a huge difference it was always sort of iteration so a fairly confident that what I was doing was accurate and I hadn't made any crazy stupid mistake in the simulation to give me you know some wildly inaccurate numbers uh but then I started sort of making more changes and doing things adding the twist in the in the blades was one of the last things I did the Staters and all the modifications around getting those right and everything just made more and more an improvement of course when I got to three times what the propeller was I was starting to say well this is really a big deal now this is could make a major difference because I mean if you're three times the efficiency of a propeller based engine and what are you compared to the efficiency of a turbofan engine which is burning tons of fuel and throwing lots of waste heat out the back uh anyway so when I got to three and a half times I pretty much exhausted all the things I wanted to do and anything else were just going to be a minor tweak and I was like well that's enough for now and so I was fortunate enough to be able to send off the both the propeller model and also this model to a gentleman who is a cfd expert at SolidWorks and was still working there at the time and asked him just simply on the propeller model just run it at 2800 RPM and tell me what the thrust number is and tell me what the torque required is and then I said to him here's the here's the Thruster model I want you to do the same thing except this one's at 5600 RPM and I didn't tell him any Dimensions how to set up or anything like that I just sent in the model of the actual thing I didn't send him the box or anything um he used SolidWorks so a completely different tool than what this is and he set up his his simulation the way he would normally do it you know for um you know using SolidWorks flow and he came up with about the same numbers for the propeller as what I had and on the thrust three he came up pretty much the same as well it was slightly higher than the numbers I had on this so to have somebody completely independent third party no um you know wasn't trying to sort of push him any direction of how to do it he just did it his own way to come up with numbers that were similar I was like well you know there's definitely something here and that's when I started to do all the work after that to uh you know design the actual physical model and uh and then you know think about you know getting it constructed so um yeah so there's a lot of a lot of iterations and stuff went into that but I was fairly confident that it was going to do what I wanted to do so um all right let's um move on and see what else I can tell you about this I know it's kind of long-winded and that but I didn't want to make two videos out of this so I just wanted to do one all right you're probably wondering by now so how are we going to power this in the aircraft in uh you know obviously there's a lot of different solutions that you could do for just a regular sort of piston engine with hooked up to a generator to generate electricity I don't think batteries are a great solution in aircraft at least not yet um but you know for a long range aircraft any sort of motor generating power with a generator is probably good good solution you know along with a small battery just sort of act as a buffer or maybe sort of you know a capacitor an ultra capacitor or something like that but I've been looking and I've I've actually tried design to try designing a couple of Sterling based generators they ended up being too too large um too heavy or whatever and so I've I've still been scouring the web and looking for other different solutions out there and maybe this is the one that is probably going to be the best thing here and obviously I don't have anything no affiliation with this company whatsoever at this point they're out of Portugal and it's called in engine is the name of the company and they've got two different variations on this engine and it's actually a pretty interesting design the way they have it it's there's a basically eight opposed Pistons here so it's four cylinders eight pistons and works sort of in this radial manner where it doesn't have any uh you know real connecting rods or anything like that and it's lightweight you can see this is this is their Aero design this this one is actually designed for an aircraft but like a very small aircraft almost like a ultralight um but and it's like 38 kilograms and they have the same variant of this it's 500 cc's and puts out 120 horsepower it has the same brake specific fuel consumption as like a diesel so 0.32 it is a gasoline engine right now but I'm wondering potentially this could be a variant of this could be modified to burn jet 4 jet fuel is a diesel compression engine and they have you know a mock-up on the on the back here for a generator on there so um you know they're designing it for cars and all that sort of stuff and you guys can do your own research on the on these people you can see the Simplicity of the air engine that's the parts for their engine and that's the parts for a V8 engine over here so big difference um and you know they have lots of information on their website here but if I go and look real quick at their I think it's their technology uh I think that's the one I want or maybe that's what I was looking at yeah that's the same one oh maybe not no here it is so there's there's a two engines there actually that's I made them say that's the aviation engineer that's purely air-cooled and that would be ideal if you could have something like that that was air cooled um um that have it burn diesel that would be great but yeah it's like a slightly different design there you see the um spark plugs are in the front there and this one the spark plugs are on the sides so anyway that you guys can do some research on there and read all about this this actually this little video here shows that uh running and shows it how it works and uh and you'll see there basically I'll just pause it there you can kind of see how the Pistons are all running back and forth here so there's not a lot of moving parts and it's super smooth and I'm sure with a with a good muffler on there you could make it super quiet and it is lightweight and puts out enough power you could have two of these in an aircraft you know for a redundancy and each one with plenty have plenty enough power to power one of these thrusters um so anyway that's kind of what I'm looking at right now as a possibility for you know for power generation for this but I'm open to different other ideas anyway if you wanted to look up this company and find out more about it it's in engine.com so uh yeah that's about what I've got for you on the uh the whole idea of of generating electricity for this all right let me give you a bit a few pictures of me putting this together or at least the aftermath of it so these coils that are designed around here end up having like a really high back EMF so it's taken a lot of voltage to run this so probably in need of a bit of redesign from someone who's a bit more of an expert of designing an electric motor the blades came out really nicely the shop that I had that made the housing and the rotor did a really horrible job on everything took six months and cost a lot of money and that rotor was not even round when I got it it was two inches out of diameter in One Direction compared to the other and the edge isn't even true so it's very doesn't run very smooth at all but I mean it is prototype uh anyway so I don't really want to be able to try and run it up to more than a thousand RPM in order to do that I'm going to have to get a lot more batteries and I'm kind of running out of time right now so I might just leave that up to the next person on their prototype to build and see what they come up with uh but anyway as you can see there's all the different construction those Wheels the black wheels are um Delrin acetol material and they actually run really smooth on the aluminum there I don't think that'll be an issue up to high speed when I'm running it at 100 RPM nothing gets hot on there it's all quite uh smooth and um it doesn't really you know have any issues or whatever unfortunately the control that I have right now doesn't allow me to do much with it as well one of the problems that it has so many poles in it so 72 magnets 144 altogether it needs a controller that can run at a high frequency and the one I have can do that but it just needs a lot more power right now so I'm kind of uh stuck with it is what it is for the Prototype right now and obviously I haven't gone to any of the trouble yet of doing anything with the blades and the automatic pitch adjustment in there right now those are all bolted in place so they can't rotate I purposely designed it so I would be able to do that without having to get all the fancy stuff in there it as you can see it runs fairly smooth for for what it is this is only at 100 RPM and of course 100 RPM because the thrust is proportional to the speed the sorry the square of the speed it's not putting out much air right now you can stand behind it you can feel the air flowing but it's not really a lot um but you know you could imagine at 5600 RPM it's crazy amount of thrust coming out of there so um yeah so that uh I think if if somebody could you know design the electric coils um better on this thing I think it would be a good a good working Solution on there okay so what's next for this well I've already filed the patent and it's apparently going to be public on March 9th it won't be approved yet but the patent offer says it will be public by then I'll paste the link in the description of this video once it becomes available I'll actually show it to you shortly some of the paperwork from it um but I think it's time for you know this to be sort of made open to other people so other companies who might be building these I mean you know any sort of company that's building electric motors or probably the turbo fan companies or whatever they might be interested in this or they might say oh no this is no good for our business it's going to destroy our turbo fan business anyway we'll have to wait and see um and then you know once the patent gets approved when if that happens then I'll be open to you know licensing for this but you know this this can scale up to the Airlines and as I said before I had one of these scaled up to 96 inches and it was putting out a hundred thousand pounds of thrust so you know equivalent to a big um you know turbo fan that's like on a Boeing or Airbus right now so it could make a huge difference and of course A lot of these EV tall companies are doing the air taxes and stuff they may want to look at this as a propulsion system as well giving them it can be so much more efficient than you know open propellers and it could potentially give the existing aircraft three times the range of what they currently have so uh and then with respect to you know the turbofan industry that's a hundred billion dollar industry a year building turbo fans for airliners so that's a big Market this is potentially going to disrupt so let's have a quick look at the pattern all right so here's the pattern at least this is the filing receipt um for the actual phone that was done and I've had um you know reputable patent attorneys in San Francisco do this for me so that's basically that and here is the filing so I'll go back up to the top here it says a lot of pages and a lot of words and a lot of uh details about all the different aspects of how this works and what all the claims are and everything like that and I've also filed um the PCT for the option for international patents as well with the participating countries the work on that program and then lastly is all the diagrams and stuff and all the figures that show you know the different aspects of it and this actually came out really nice so I've got all the details in there about how the various different aspects all work for the design and such and such and such so anyway you guys will be able to see that when it's online at least from what I've been told shows all the details there about how the blades rotate and the bearings and what sort of stuff that I talked about in there an actuator and all that stuff so anyway you guys can look through uh all that uh at your own Leisure when it becomes available so uh let's move on and let me talk a little bit about a potential application for this Thruster that I'm most interested and excited about all right well I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because I'm going to do a whole separate video on this that I'll link uh in this the description of this video and you know a lot of you watching I've obviously seen this aircraft before but last time you saw it it didn't have uh I had a Thruster on here but it had a center a section in there because I didn't want you guys to see what I was working on yet because it was the big secret thing that I've been working on all this time but anyway um we've got a pretty capable aircraft if we have this set up here because if two of these were 1500 pounds of thrust on them each that's three thousand pounds of thrust and this aircraft um I'm hoping to try and talk an automaker into building it on a production line out of aluminum and you know building them in in quantities you know maybe 30 000 a year trying to get the price between maybe 100 and 120 000. um and I think there's a lot of money to be made for the company that does that because you know it's this is actually much simpler to build and what like an SUV would be anyway there's some cool stuff that you guys haven't seen yet for those ones who have seen this is that if we do this and we do this see if I can make it work s and we do this we now have the option to have a full VTOL aircraft so we can transition into vertical uh hover for takeoff and landing and still you know end up basically doing 300 knots to AirSpeed on probably as little as maybe 11 gallons an hour because of the efficiency of the thrusters so with the three thrusters here you know one on each of three corners you have 4 500 pounds of lift and so at 2500 pound aircraft would have about a two thousand pound useful load on the obviously take away fuel from there but the fuel burn on this would be a lot lower anyway because of how fast you're going most trips you know the savings is all and what's you know what these thrusters can give us so uh yeah and I think if you know if we can talk an automaker into building these in a lot of numbers we can turn these into air taxis at least half of them the air taxis and half of them for private ownership and um you know really create something that's uh pretty special anyway I'm going to link this uh in another video so you can get all the details and stuff about this and watch that in a separate video so uh anyway um let's see what else do I have for you I don't think there's too much more all right so indulge me for a minute while we do some calculations to compare this Thruster to a large turbo fan and the one I've picked is that the ge9x so how I'm doing this started out with the Thruster at 24 inch diameter and we're scaling it up by four times so four times in every direction X Y and Z and so we end up with a 96 inch diameter and then the three-dimensional scale factor so in other words the weight and the thrust and the fuel consumption everything like that would be the scale factor four to the power of three so that's 64 times so if we take the thrust at 24 the 24 inches 15 to 75 pounds we end up with multiplying that by 64. we end up with a hundred thousand pounds of thrust and if we compare that to the ge9x that's 110 000 pounds so it's sort of you know in the similar ballpark so it's a fairly you know decent comparison and that one there has a diameter of 134 inches so it's quite a lot larger in diameter and then the weight um from the on-shape model the projected weight on this Thruster is 175 pounds and so if you scale it up times 64 is 11 200 pounds and then the weight on the ge9x is 21 000 pounds so you know it's almost half the weight or slightly more than half the weight and then the thrust to weight ratio is nine for the Thruster and then obviously nine for the larger one as well and then the thrust to weight ratio of the g9x is 5.18 all right so now the fuel consumption this gets a little bit more tricky because there's not a lot of information on this and I actually did find where somebody has picked up this from a triple seven 200 this is the fuel um fuel burn at different altitudes and different Cruise power settings so um I've read that the the g90 engine which is this this one is from is uh 10 less fuel efficient than the new ge9x so if we take this 9700 as as like a Max crew so that's 87 or not actually 91 in one and then over here we're going to use a cruise a cruise one here which actually could go lower but it's pretty much the same all the way across the board here for this um different altitudes um you still end up with this you know much lower number here and this is pounds per hour so if we work that number in there I've said ninety percent of the GE 90 which I've also read is around about 1.2 kilograms per second of fuel so that works out at 90 sorry 3960 kilograms an hour which is 8712 pounds per hour and again this is Max power uh so that's that is gallons per hour is 1300 so that's divided by 6.7 and so the estimate for the small Thruster would be five gallons an hour for the how much horsepower it is and so the larger one would be 320 and so the the performance gain on that would be four times uh the efficiency which is crazy insane uh and then if you go to crew some Cruise numbers here as I said before we've taken that so we've end up with four thousand two hundred forty four pounds per hour for the ge9x again just total estimates here I can't guarantee any sort of accuracy on these uh which is 633 gallons per hour and so the performance Improvement there would be 3.3 and if looking at the capacity of the Boeing triple seven this is on the 300 version there has 171 000 liters which is forty five thousand gallons it would give it a cruise range of 35 hours which seems a lot but maybe that's what it is I don't know it's very hard to find information on this but either way um it's interesting because I mean these numbers here is is what tells the story you know if you had one of these uh scaled up engines inside of you know a triple seven and you only need a quarter of the fuel what does that tell you I mean what does that give you you don't have to carry all that extra weight and the cost and everything it makes a massive difference so anyway again these are just numbers if someone else wants to run them more than happy to see what you come up with um I would be really interested to see someone else's calculations on this let me finish by asking you to leave a comment and let me know what you think of all this in the comments of the video and share it with your friends and anybody else that you know who's in the aviation industry who might be interested in this and uh we'll see how things progress with this I'm hoping that it's well received and some other companies can pick it up and you know use their more resources that they have than what I had and get a few of these built and see what they can really do see what the performance really is so thanks again if you're still watching and you made it all the way to the end really appreciate your your time for uh watching this and look out or take a look at the other video that I have Linked In this one and we'll catch you over there cheers

Channel: Peter Muller

Views: 665,201

Keywords:

Id: Lrnu0-vL504

Length: 53min 23sec (3203 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 04 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/nopantspaul]

There are some very very good reasons for attaching blades to an axial hub as opposed to running them along the outer radius.

Linear speed of bearing surfaces is far higher = much heavier bearings that are also much larger and don't last as long.

Centrifugal force puts blades in compression instead of tension = you lose the CF stiffening advantage and trade it for buckling/flutter issues.

I'd be curious to see how efficient these blades actually are. My suspicion is that even for this concept they are much too long.

[u/Sniperonzolo]

He makes a great job at explaining how much more efficient it is than a 2-blade propeller, which is not surprising it is, but doesn’t show how much more efficient it is than a regular turbofan with a central hub and shaft.

[u/VinceSamios]

The simple answer is no. It's too complicated and heavy. In theory it's a great idea, in practice not so much.

[u/1nvent]

Lets see that things bearings after 1000hrs and realistic rpm.

[u/Drone314]

The Raptor Aircraft story should be a case study in engineering & design, fascinating to watch but ultimately doomed for so many reasons.

[u/CoffeeCave]

Might have a viable application in water-crafts, submarines or ships.

[u/xhaikalf]

Same design was used for tidal turbine generator by openhydro

[u/thezenfisherman]

I am not smart enough to know which fan is better. But I am totally distracted by his constant head turning.