The FIRST Toroidal Prop for FPV: ON TEST!

hi there everyone I have a super interesting and unique testing video for you today because we're going to be looking at this this is the foxy donut 5145 toroidal propeller and it's the first mass-produced toroidal propeller for fpv for those of you that might not be aware toroidal props were invented by a research group at MIT in 2017 and they promise to offer much lower noise and higher efficiency than the typical propellers that we use for a whole bunch of applications including Marine propellers and also propellers for our drones as well in this video I'm going to be testing this Droid propeller on my thrust test stand we're going to be looking at the thrust the power the responsiveness the efficiency and the noise profile of this propeller to see how it Compares against one of the best propellers that I've tested so far this Nazgul F5 prop and if it can match or even exceed this Nasco F5 prop in some respects then these terrible propellers might be the very best propellers that you can buy for fpv today it's a lot to cover in one video I'm not going to waste any more time let's dive right into it so what makes a toroidal prop so special well as any propeller spins it creates an area of high pressure below the blade and an area of low air pressure above the blade and it's that difference in pressure that provides the thrust that the prop is able to generate as we move towards the tip of a traditional propeller there's a big difference between the pressure underneath and above the blade and the air wants to Rush from the high pressure underneath the blade to the low pressure above it and as that air rushes around the tip of the propeller it creates a strong tip Vortex like a mini tornado at the tip of the propeller and that Vortex creates a lot of noise and it also contributes to quite a bit of the drag that the propeller experiences as it's spinning so also damages the efficiency of a propeller with a toroidal prop as we move out to the tip there isn't a sharp tip of the propeller blade anymore because the toroidal prop kind of Blends one blade into the other it spreads out the area over which that high and low pressure can equalize you don't get such a strong tip Vortex and therefore the toroidal prop promises less noise and also less loss due to the tip Vortex and so better efficiency as well so the theory sounds really really good but we're going to have to test it out in practice on the thrust test stand now it's time to get into some results I subjected the Nasco F5 and the fox here donut 5145 to a battery of different tests including a throttle ramp from zero to 100 throttle to look at the thrust and efficiency of the prop an acceleration test to see how responsive the prop is and a brand new test a sound pressure level test where I looked at the amount of noise each prop produced over a range of different tracking positions all of these tests were done on my standard test motor for props which is the zing2 2207 1855 KV before we dive into the results let me know if you're enjoying the video with a like a subscribe and maybe a comment down below I love reading your comments and I really appreciate the feedback now on with the results alright now it's time to take a look at some data and we're going to start with the thrust versus RPM chart this shows how much thrust a prop is able to produce across a range of motor RPM and what we can see here is that the iflight Nasco F5 prop is a higher pitch prop than the fox here donut 5145 it produces more thrust at a given RPM and that's going to make it better for achieving a higher top speed but potentially a little bit more difficult to control especially low in the throttle the foxy donut 5145 being a lighter pitch prop is going to give you more low throttle control but it's not going to have so much top end the next chart we're going to look at is the thrust versus Power chart and this shows how much thrust the prop is able to produce for the amount of mechanical Power that it's consuming from the motor and what we can see here is that there's a big difference in efficiency between the Nazgul F5 and the donut 5145 the iflight nasgow F5 consumes pretty much exactly the same amount of power as a fox here donut at Full Throttle but it produces significantly more thrust and that means it's a more efficient prop and that's surprising because one of the touted benefits of toroidal props is an improvement in efficiency we're not seeing that here with this design the traditional Nasco F5 prop is significantly more efficient the responsiveness of a prop is really important for keeping a quad stable in the air and I tested the responsiveness of the Nasco F5 and the donut 5145 and found them to be similarly responsive so there's no measurable difference between these two props in terms of their responsiveness it's not only responsiveness that determines how smooth and stable the footage from your quad will be the amount of vibration that's generated by the prop is also really important for that and this vibration versus thrust chart shows you how much vibration the props produce at certain thrust levels what we can see is that the fox here donut 5145 produces quite a bit more vibration than the nazco F5 particularly at high throttle levels and there is always a risk with having a lot of vibration coming from the prop that some of that will make it through into your HD camera footage or fpv feed particularly at those higher throttle positions where the property is generating more vibration the iflight Nasco F5 has a much lower vibration level particularly at those higher throttle levels and so it's likely to give you smoother footage with less vibration and less Jello as a result the final graph I want to show you is the sound pressure level produced by each of these props at a range of different thrust values and one of the advantages of tutorial props is supposed to be that they're significantly quieter than traditional props and that's not what I found with my testing in my testing the donut 5145 the toroidal prop was slightly louder than the nazco F5 the traditional prop at every thrust level and so I wasn't able to reproduce the MIT result of lower noise for the toroidal prop but of course it's not just the sound pressure level it's also the character of The Sound how noticeable or annoying the sound is so let's listen to the toroidal prop versus the traditional prop back to back and see which you think is the more noticeable or annoying sound so that brings us to the end of the video and as always the conclusions and although I love how these props look and I love what they represent in terms of Technology Innovation and I love that foxy decided to actually go ahead take the plunge and make a mass-produced tutorial prop despite all of that I still don't think I'm going to be running these props day to day on my drones they just don't quite yet have the performance of a well-optimized traditional prop they produce less thrust they make more noise and they're less efficient and for those reasons I can't really see myself switching to them just yet I'm really hopeful that there is something to this technology and that in the future there will be a V2 and a V3 of the donut 5145 and the efficiency will improve and the sound level will come down and if that happens you can bet I'm going to be retesting them and the moment they look to be equal to or better than a traditional prop in any of those areas I'm going to be recommending that some of us start flying them but until that day I think it's just fantastic that we have people in the hobby who are interested enough to make stuff like this to try it out and I'm really excited to have tested it if you like this type of test work you like the videos that I produce and you want to support the channel you want to help me make more videos like this then please consider joining my patreon you can join from just a few dollars a month you'll get access to a special area of my Discord server you'll get sneak peeks of the projects that I'm working on and you'll get to know about new AOS products before anyone else that's all I have for you for today so until next time I wish you all very very happy flying and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Rosser

Views: 11,761

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Id: l5ANUagwEBw

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023