Dyson Powered R/C Plane

this video is sponsored by a factor while I was on a bike ride I found a Dyson handheld vacuum on the side of the road so I strapped it to my bike and brought it home turns out its six cell lithium-ion battery was just bad The Bad Apple spoils the bunch this one cell is at zero volts but the rest of them are fine after replacing the battery the vacuum was good as new I was so impressed by how much power this thing had and how quiet it was but I wanted to take it apart and look at the motor but I also didn't want to ruin my new vacuum so I bought a broken one to take apart instead look at that there it is the magic impeller wow oh my God that motor has so much cogging I can hardly Spin The Thing by hand it must go so fast the whole motor assembly is mounted in rubber to reduce vibration and Noise turns out when I plugged in the power wires to a 6S lipo it started right up so maybe this vacuum wasn't broken after all the motor is definitely much louder and scarier outside of its housing damn that thing screams I measured that it was pulling 120 watts at its low power setting and 350 Watts at its high power setting that's pretty crazy for a fan with a 21 millimeter intake diameter it's really tiny centrifugal compressors like this one work on the same principle that makes it impossible to stay on a Merry-Go-Round while it's spinning really fast the centrifugal force flings the air molecules from the inside towards the outside this causes a low pressure on the inside so new air gets sucked down through the top and the process continues centrifugal compressors are very good at creating high pressure but they aren't as good at moving large volumes of air that's where propellers have an advantage to generate the thrust needed to propel an aircraft forward you need to push air backwards this is Newton's third law for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction for generating static thrust it's better to move a lot of air slowly than a small amount of air quickly and these centrifugal blowers are better at moving a small amount of air quickly at high pressure that brings up the question do these Dyson Motors move enough air to propel an RC plane these Dyson Motors alone do not generate any thrust because they just blow air in every direction out these slots in the side in order to redirect to the air to make thrust we'll need to design a snail-shaped housing for that I hopped into onshape my CAD program of choice if you want to look at how I designed these parts or download them for your own use they are just a click away the link is available in the video description onshape is a cloud native CAD platform which makes sharing files and collaborating with others super easy I highly recommend checking it out at first I tried resin printing the snail blower but the print failed every time too many cups and overhangs then I tried splitting the model in half and fdm printing it on the flash Forge guider 3 plus this worked great apart from all the little fdm ridges that are unaerodynamic to smooth these out I mixed up some epoxy based fairing compound and spread it all around the inside after that cured I sanded it smooth then I clamped the shell halves around the fan the two halves got glued and taped together then the whole thing was glued onto the Dyson motor the Dyson motor's intake cologne has these sharp ridges on the intake oh wow that is super mesmerizing this footage was shot at 420 frames per second on the free fly system's wave camera pretty nice anyways I was concerned that the sharp edges of the intake would generate turbulence that would ultimately reduce the thrust so I designed this flare to Bell mouth intake tuba looking thing and to help smooth out the flow and now it's real smooth the resin print did work this time but it's clear resin and I sanded it so that's why it looks like crap one interesting thing is that the impeller completely removes the fog from the air probably because the fog particles go through what is essentially a centrifuge and get flung out to the walls and then turn back into liquid that would explain why there was a puddle on the table after doing this I made the intake fan out really large like a horn because I've heard that having air accelerate over the curve of the inlet will cause a low pressure in front and suck the whole thing forward generating additional thrust later in this video we'll put that idea to the test hey quick reminder don't forget to subscribe if you like watching my videos also I recently started an Instagram account for RC test flight so follow that if you want to see what I'm working on so anyways the snail blower was obviously working quite well at this point and I wanted to know how much thrust it could generate to measure the thrust I mounted it on a rail with some roller wheels and had it push into the scale at full Chooch it was doing about 190 grams of thrust not great considering that the whole thing weighs about 290 grams the exhaust opening of my snail blower was 21 millimeters in diameter which which is the same size as the intake since centrifugal impellers are better at generating static pressure it might help if we choke the flow a bit to increase the exit velocity this new tip increased to the thrust by 14 percent so that's great it's consuming 350 watts to make 220 grams of thrust that's extremely efficient if you're comparing it to my laser lawnmower or my solenoid powered peanut butter mixer in other words it's pretty inefficient so with that said let's build an airplane I'm reusing the horizontal stabilizer from my multi-element airfoil airplane I'm wanting to hit two birds with one stone here and use this new plane for some Wing design testing in the future so I'm using elevons on the tail to hopefully avoid needing ailerons on the wing I threw together a fuselage out of some six millimeter defron that all got attached to this 16 millimeter carbon tube that I'm using to hold the tail there's the vertical stabilizer going on and here's the wing I'm using a thin wall hexagonal carbon tube for this bar that got glued onto a depron base and I'm also using defron to form the top of the airfoil the Leading Edge got glued together and then and taped with packaging tape then I clamped The Edge down to the table and glued the trailing Edge and then I weighed it down with a bunch of batteries to hold the airfoil shape together this left me with a pretty nice looking Wing that was super strong I'm using a flight controller running audio pilot although it's not really relevant for this project I slapped the Dyson on there and were ready to rip just kidding This Plane turned out to be way bigger than it should have been for the Dyson project alone so I decided it would likely need two Dyson Motors I harvested a second one out of another broken Dyson and printed another snail housing for it this time with the constricting nozzle built in since these motors don't have proportional throttle control I'm just gonna have to flip them on by hand before launch and then to cut the throttle I have this Servo that flips the switches off so I just brought the Dyson plane to the park for the first time and I'm just going to do a quick little test flight Glide just to kind of make sure it's sort of stable and kind of get a feel for whether or not it'll have enough power to fly this is very on aerodynamic just having all these wires flopping around but whatever look at that there's bald eagles thermaling up there so from this quick flight it seems like the dysons do have enough thrust to fly the plane I also discovered that my tailavawns do not provide any roll control so I did end up having to add ailerons I'm using high-tech hs5055 mg servos for this plane but you know what doesn't need to have ailerons in order to have roll control Factor meals these pre-made Ready-to-Eat meals roll right up to your door saving you trips to the grocery store my favorite thing about receiving Factor meals 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box now back to the video so we're here at the park and today I put ailerons on it because last time I noticed there was no roll control with just the elevons on the tail so hopefully now I'll have enough roll control to fly it around here and see if it works Zach here is going to be our pilot oh god he's a real life pilot so I figure he has a better chance of making this work than me it's a lot of pressure got tailor-ons we might have too much roll control now you know what I mean that's a lot when you're going that slow it's nice to have more services moving hey man these are jet engines who says it's going to go slow I don't know the air coming out of the back of these things is probably going like Mach 2. yes oh my gosh it's working incredible oh yeah and I keep wanting to touch the throttle like you said but no throttle for you sweet baby Jesus look at that it's actually not even that grossly underpowered it's like pretty high yeah yeah I mean it's it's climbing and it doesn't feel like it's struggling to climb like I'm not at a high angle of attack it's actually climbing on its own and we have no battery voltage feedback so if it starts to smoke you might want to land oh yeah yeah sure that sounds good look at that it's soaring like an eagle James Dyson would be so proud permission to buzz the tower it sounds so cool it does sound different for sure yeah it's not your usual EDF yeah it sounds like a UMX like 93 which I guess that's probably because it's about 30 millimeters exactly like it actually last flying a plane that's like eight times the size of that yeah a lot of power extremely inefficient with that being said you should probably land pretty soon the throttle has been cut that's a permanent throttle cut There's No Going Back oh God to be an efficient Wing huh the glide ratio the glide ratio is like not that bad considering how much junk is that's glued to the top of the plane we're at 24 yeah dude so that was like a perfect yeah you had a good gut intuition there for me to cut the thrall yeah I was having fun but yeah you got a whole lot of power sweet man nice work don't compliment me compliment James Dyson he did the real engineering that's true man the sketchy part about this is when I flip the switches to turn on the motors they kind of like half weld themselves together so I just have to hope they don't permanently weld themselves together because they're only rated for like five amps and it's doing a lot more amps than that [Music] yes Daniel flies the Dyson yes the touch and go all right ready on that throttle kill There She Goes we're committed yes I don't know I would buy it from a local hobby shop yeah okay so this is this is what we're gonna do we're just gonna take this and we're just gonna turn it around and see what happens like that ah yes I've seen several sources online that talk about how the air on the inside surface of the duct accelerates so you've got a low pressure on the inlet that sucks it forward and increases thrust we're about to find out if that makes a noticeable difference my prediction is that these things are able to generate so much vacuum force that they'll still be able to just suck air in even though it's going the wrong way oh well I mean just just as an armchair pilot it seems like it's about the same is it I don't feel like it has any less power yeah yeah it feels pretty much completely the same yeah oh that's hilarious I've heard so many people say oh edfs get all their thrust and efficiency gains well they're not that efficient in the first place then it might prove the statement wrong but they get all their thrust from the from the intake but I don't know this thing's flying pretty high yeah it's climbing on its own man I can't tell if it's a viewfinder we making it oh yeah we're making it it's barely dude yes oh my gosh success the weird thing is it didn't even sound any different right now any different to you no yeah I thought it was gonna sound like it was just suffocating like screeching trying to suck air in but it was like the exact same pretty much I was still curious as to whether or not the flared intake had any effect on thrust at all it's possible it did have a slight effect that was just imperceivable relative to the total thrust of the airplane so here I did a back-to-back comparison and there was Zero difference 260 grams of thrust at both angles pretty interesting I was quite pleased that this ended up working because I didn't do any math or anything to figure out if the motors would actually have enough thrust to fly the plane and it was just a hunch that one motor wouldn't have enough thrust which I still think is true because this thing had a very sluggish climb rate centrifugal impellers like this one are clearly not good for RC planes but it's possible that some sort of an impeller like this could actually have an advantage over a standard EDF when it comes to a super fast aircraft propellers and ducted fans alike produce less and less thrust as they get going faster and faster with the centrifugal fan you can get higher exhaust speeds than an EDF because it builds more pressure so you can constrict the flow but it's tough to say whether or not a centrifugal fan actually has enough thrust in the first place to get you going fast enough as to where it would be advantageous it would be an interesting thing to experiment with like I mentioned these super slow-mo Clips were shot at 420 frames per second on the free fly wave camera high-speed cameras need a ton of light so I was using these Stratus LEDs 150 watt air modules to illuminate the scene the wave camera can shoot at a much higher frame rate at reduced resolutions if we crank it down to 128p we can shoot at over 9000 frames per second by doing this I was able to measure that the impeller was spinning at 82 500 RPM that's actually kind of surprisingly low considering that most sources on the internet say that the Dyson V6 motor spins at 110 000 RPM maybe they measured 110 000 with the flow constricted so that the motor has less load that's one counter-intuitive thing about vacuums when you put your hand over the tube and block the airflow it actually speed up and draw less power the airflow is the load so when the airflow is blocked and the impeller is just spinning in its own vacuum there's nothing for it to fight against and it speeds up and consumes less power after I had already filmed this video formlabs sent me their form 3 plus SLA printer most consumer grade resin printers make pretty fragile Parts but this one is capable of making parts that are much stronger and more functional in the next video of this series I'm going to try and design a blower with a much higher thrust to weight ratio and we'll see if these resin impellers can hold up to the insanely high RPMs that the Dyson can run at so stay tuned and big thanks to formlabs for hooking me up with the form 3 plus because this thing is going to be an amazing addition to my workshop here's some more Shenanigans with the tail heavy Productions boys other than that that's it for this video thanks for watching bye oh [Laughter] [Music] dude what [Music] whoa dude what yes

Channel: rctestflight

Views: 1,698,585

Keywords: Rc airplane, Rc, impeller, blower, turbo, powered, airplane, jet, vacuum, Dyson

Id: evNS6bbfin4

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023