Drone Propulsion - The LATEST Breakthroughs!

from cycle rotors to jet power and even artificial wanes we take a look at some of the strangest propulsion systems out there for drones as most of you know Leonardo da Vinci came up with some very fascinating aerial screw designs over 500 years ago and finally this idea has been modernized first modeled in this simulation this design demonstrated some very interesting vortexes and after several months in testing the University of Maryland actually came up with a drone which could fly on this design with the right optimization the craft could reduce now wash and potentially operate quieter than a typical propeller the downside is is that this is a pretty complex design without gaining any efficiencies in lift it's fairly safe to say that this is not going to displace propellers anytime soon but it is fascinating to see something like the aerial screw actually work for drones so there are many different ideas out there and a newer idea was likely derived from the Marine Cheryl propeller the original selling points were faster planing and more efficiency at a particular RPM MIT transitioned this idea over to the multi-rotor and there's some very interesting improvements with the most notable being that there was less audible spikes at specific frequencies now of course many people have tested this propeller design and there's still debate on performance gains basically this prop has to be optimized for every multi-rotor out there the argument is is that this will likely not have any Improvement because you can already configure a propeller to have three or four blades with different flying characteristics ultimately I think the toroidop is a very Niche thing and it's not going to break numbers anytime soon I'm going to digress a little bit and get into a different type of propulsion system called the cycle rotor and you can kind of think of this as a paddle boat going through water the cycled Water Works by accelerating fluid with a perpendicular rotating mechanism in this orbital motion along with pitch angle generates a relatively High thrust individual blades can also be pitched providing rapid thrust vectoring there are several downsides to the cycle motor but the most prominent being complexity so higher cost although with being a heavier setup however you could use a cycle motor for different hybrid applications the Austria is an excellent hybrid example unlike a multi-rotor which has to pitch to change its horizontal position the Astra can just use a cycle rotor on top and it doesn't pitch at all making it very useful for certain applications like inspection or even working on remote equipment in conclusion cycle Motors are probably not going to displace propellers-based systems anytime soon but they could be used in hybrid applications where there is more stabilization required so probably the most obvious and extreme idea is to retrofit the multi-rotor with a jet engine many startup electric vehicle companies have revealed their own concept with jet engine simply due to the Extreme Performance gains in reality there are very few jet drones simply due to cost the jackpot is a perfect example as it has very extreme abilities such as going over 300 miles per hour with a 40 pound payload but it's also going to be priced at around 250 000 but we ever see cheaper models come out well it's kind of hard to say because this is dependent on Innovation and Fabrication techniques so until we get multi-material 3D printers out there which can build jet engines I highly doubt that we will see jet drones flying around everywhere however jet engines have one of the highest thrust ratios compared to all the different propulsion systems and there will always be a high-end market for these types of manned aerial vehicles one of the weirdest candidates out there is Ion propulsion Electro hydrodynamic thrusters use a high strength field to generate a plasma of ionized air ions are drawn towards a negatively charged grid Collide into neutral molecules and then impact momentum this was experimented with a very small two centimeter squared prototype and oddly enough it was found that scaling EHD thrusters down actually provides better thrust to weight ratios so this might be a good idea for micro aerial vehicles but with all things considered it never really took off so to speak as it's very difficult to integrate a high voltage power supply on board Ethan cross has also developed a large RC vehicle with its own power supply now he is still working on this idea and he's trying to progress it into further applications so make sure to check out his channel and I will try to keep an update on his work as well another side project worth noting as Juventus which attempts to use ion stabilization with a ducted fan in the middle for lower decibels it's still work in progress and nothing revolutionary has come to fruition ultimately ion propulsion is very interesting because there are no moving parts but it's very tricky to incorporate an onboard power supply and these types of drones have very limited maneuverability the basic variants of waned robots are slow and they lack the performance characteristics of a typical drone however there are newer micro aerial Vehicles which bypass the limitation of typical motor and gear designs there are different ways around this but the most fascinating development is probably the liquid Amplified zipping actuator and this has the potential to cycle at a very fast rate utilizing electrodes and a liquid dielectric the electrodes can be pulsed and they can actually last for over 1 million Cycles it's a type of redundant system so it's perfect for microaerial vehicles but it's still not really scalable for larger types of drones as an overview there are many different alternatives to a typical propeller the most notable being the aerial screw and the Toyota prop however these two types of designs have to be very specific and they have to be applicable to a very particular multi-rotor in order to be effective cycle Motors also exist they're a little bit more complex but you can use them for hybrid stabilization ion propulsion has a really strong potential no pun intended but it is very reliant on having an onboard power supply with a high voltage there is also a flapping wind design which could utilize a liquid dielectric and these could be very useful for micro aerial Vehicles Jeffrey Paulson has the highest thrust to weight ratios but it is overly expensive and really hinged on future fabrication techniques in the future it is very likely that micro aerial Vehicles will have some different type of setup but for the typical average consumer drone you will likely see propellers here to stay for a very long time anyways I most certainly got some stuff around on this video and I would definitely like to hear some of your opinions about these propulsion-based systems so please leave a comment like that video If you enjoyed it and also make sure 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Channel: Tech Planet

Views: 611,483

Keywords: best drones, new drones, strangest drones, weirdest drones, biggest drones, manned drones, new evtols, new aircraft, strangest aircraft

Id: H_GWEQBZBcI

Length: 7min 3sec (423 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/MoreNormalThanNormal]

This is not my video or channel. I am submitting because the video was very quick and to the point.