Super Capacitor Plane

rubber band powered planes are one of the simplest forms of powered flight by simply winding up the elastic lots of potential energy can be stored which once released can produce sufficient thrust for flight now recently I bought this small foam toy plane that can be charged up in under 10 seconds to power a small electric motor the way this works is it has a tiny super Capac inside that stalls the potential energy like the rubber band which is then used to power the motor for flight but wouldn't it be cool if it could be charged up by hand to do this we need to build a hand crank generator to charge up the capacitor so I started by 3D printing a rotor that's I can mount some magnets to with alternating magnetic poles around its circumference and this rotor can be mounted to an axle with bearings which allows it to spin then a coil can be made by winding some Thin copper wire around a template that that will fit perfectly between the two magnet rotors so as the alternating magnets spin the magnetic field within the coil rapidly changes creating an alternating current which shows up on the multimeter as a voltage but to generate more than 4 volts we need to increase the speed at which the rotor spins so I made a housing for the generator which allows me to attach a gear to a crank arm this gear ratio means I can put a lot of torque in at a slower speed and the magnets will spin at a much higher speed and now I can generate over seven volts to increase this voltage even further I wound seven more coils and glue them to the center bracket then they can be soldered with two in series and four in parallel to hopefully double the output voltage and increase the current output the only issue with this current generator is it produces alternating current due to the alternating magnet poles so I solded up some diodes to make a full Bridge rectifier which will convert the alternating current current from the coils into direct current at the output and now we can generate around 17 volts which should be enough for this project by the way if you want to see more info about this hand crank generator I made a video on my second Channel which has more information about how the magnets produce the alternating current and how the full Bridge rectifier Works to convert the AC to DC I'll link in the description below or it will pop up at the end of this video to charge the small capacitor plane I've first disassembled the battery charger pack and used the connector to build an adapter for the generator and then I can start winding up the plane as if it were a rubber band plane only this time it took just nine turns of the crank to fully charge right let's see how well this mini super capacitor plane works just give it a quick charge and there we have it it's already at 3 volts ready [Music] and oh that's going further than I expected right I've given it a bit of uh Rudder trim to hopefully make it go in a circle rather than disappearing off into the distance and let's charge up see if we can get a decent flight time with this thing right I'm going to try and film with the camera [Music] oh good Landing it's really cool having this tiny plane charge up from Simply turning a hand crank for a few seconds but as you can probably see the hand crank generator is far too overpowered for such a small toy so let's make a big plane this is a 3vt 100 farad super capacitor but what does that mean well this is a lithium battery of a similar size and although they both store electrical energy they do it in very different ways the capacitor can store about .125 W hours but the battery can store about 10 W hours which is around 80 times more the capacitor weighs less than the battery but is still awful in terms of energy density but where the super capacitor wins over the battery is its rapid charge and discharge rates as it stores the energy as a charge between two conductive plates as opposed to a chemical storage in a battery this also means that the capacitor is far easier to charge as a lithium battery requires careful management of charge current and voltage to prevent it bursting into flames whereas as long as the super capacitor doesn't exceed its rated voltage it should be able to charge from any electrical source making it perfect for charging from the hand crank generator only problem is the super capacitors have a low rated voltage of only 3 volts so I'm going to use six of them by gluing the capacitors together I can solder them in series to increase the rated voltage to 18 volts this does reduce the total capacitance of the pack but the energy stored is now 75 ws and having them solded in series means it requires a balance lead to regulate the voltage of each individual capacitor to prevent any over voltage failures they can then be packaged with 3D printed endcaps and some heat shrink for protection before soldering on a power connector for charging and discharging so now we have a super capacitor pack that weighs 166 G and has the same energy storage as this 3 G coin cell but I bet this tiny thing would burst into flames if it were to match the output power of the capacitors let's build a plane around it I started by modeling the super capacitors in on shape which is a cloud-based CAD program that runs in your web browser and this allows me to design an aerodynamic fuselage around the capacitors which can be 3D printed at least until the print failed this fuselage is designed to have the motor mounted on the front but the small surface area caused the print to detach from the build plate though at least I got the dimensions of the super capacitors correct as they fit perfectly inside so I reprinted a new design with a larger nose area on the build plate and it printed successfully but currently this larger nose isn't very aerodynamic so I made this cowling which creates a smooth transition between the motor and the fuselage as well as hiding all the wires I then installed all the radio control gear and speed controller for the motor before squeezing in the super capacitor pack which takes up the majority of the fuse large okay let's see if we can charge up the super capacitors to run all the radio control gear and power the motor so so first of all plug in the generator and start cranking right I've charged up the capacitors to 8 volts which is just under half of their Max rated voltage uh so unplug the generator and then plug the capacitors into the motor controller and everything should power up now if I move the throttle stick the motor should spin perfect right now let's check the radio control gear at the back all the servos move fine uh now what I want to do is check what voltage the motor runs out because the servos and the radio control gear runs at a minimum of 5 volts uh so if this runs and drains the capacitors lower than 5 volts I'll lose control of the plane so hopefully that doesn't happen Okay so this is the current voltage of the capacitors and as you can see they draining down uh is about 0.1 of a volt every second or so which is just running the radio control gear but let's put the motor on and see how quickly it goes down okay it seems like the uh everything switches off when it gets to about 6 and a half volts so the question is do the servo still move they seem to which is good uh I'm not sure how much time I'll have so say uh if we were to fly up really high using the motor and then it turns off a six and a half volts how much time we'll have to uh glide back down before we lose control we just dropped below 5 volts and my uh radio is freaking out because it's losing signal so yeah 5 volts is definitely the minimum voltage limit so I think I should be able to keep control of it before it lands fingers crossed for the wings and tail of the plane I decided to reuse what I built for my previous air powerered plane project as they are lightweight efficient and took a while to build which will save some cost and time for this project these simply clamp into the new fuselage and the cables can be attached for the tail control finally I attached a folding propeller to the motor to prevent any damage when landing and it's ready for a test so let's just plug this into the generator and get spinning all right unplug the generator super capacitor plane first test [Music] flight oh perfect it's got plenty of power I can feel the power already juicing though feels like it's going to cut out any second now let's try and gain some altitude actually I'm going to cut the throttle here just to be safe and see how well it Glides well the propeller is still spinning oh well that went better than I expected these conditions are absolutely awful right let's charge it up and give it another test flight I guess [Applause] and throttle [Music] up I might see how high I can get on this flight and then we can just glide back down okay the motors's just died it is a bit annoying that windmilling of the propeller which is increasing the drag of the plane a lot let's try and get one more Circle in then we'll come in for a landing nice that folding propeller is definitely useful for well saving the propeller and the nose works really well so with a hand crank charge time of just over 2 minutes this super capacitor plane can sustain constant powered flight for just under 2 minutes therefore with some slightly faster cranking and some better flight conditions it should be capable of a one:1 hand crank to flight time ratio which I think is pretty cool that was perfect timing it just ran out as soon as it got just in front of the camera I find it fascinating to apply theories into practical applications like in this project but building projects like this isn't easy however brilliant can help if you want to learn math data science and computer science interactively as well as thousands of other lessons from basic to Advanced topics I've always believed that the best way to learn a topic is to apply to something where you can see the results and the interactivity of Brilliance lessons really helped with achieving this like learning how your phone uses time from satellites to locate your exact position on Earth or even learning how to code a Mars Rover brilliant has you covered so if this sounds of interest to you then you can get started for a full 30 days for free by going to brilliant.org Stanton and the first 200 people that sign up will get 20% off a premium annual subscription so go check out brilliant in the link in the description down below

Channel: Tom Stanton

Views: 392,923

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Id: zEahoJZgfys

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2023