Include enough on-board battery to safely land if the dead-man is tripped. That takes this from "neat internet video" to "workable thing".
Brilliant!
Include enough on-board battery to safely land if the dead-man is tripped. That takes this from "neat internet video" to "workable thing". -- Drew |
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Yeah, thought of that too. But is it needed; don't they auto-rotate like autogyros/real helicopters?
i.e, kind of being their own parachute? (Dangit, where's Helicopter Boy when you need him?) -- Christian R. Conrad Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi (Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.) |
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Doesn't that depend on the mass of the turbine?
-- Drew |
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"Turbine" -YM rotor? Mass - YM keeps spinning by inertia? Didn't think so; aerodynamic thing, innit?
Vague recollections from pop-sci books or articles in my teens, which were in another century, so no guarantees for anything. But OK, so add an emergency battery. Or a parachute, if that's lighter. (OK, more liable to wind drift -- but OTOH, a big signal flag to find it by.) -- Christian R. Conrad Same old username (as above), but now on iki.fi (Yeah, yeah, it redirects to the same old GMail... But just in case I ever want to change.) |
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Metal vs. plastic
On a full-size chopper the blades are probably composite, but are very long compared to the diameter of the (usually turbine) motor. The motor is metal, but spinning far faster than the rotor. Which has more inertia? Dunno. But on most drones it's plastic blades connected to an electric motor. The blades probably have very little inertia compared to the mass of the drone. And electric motors don't "coast". To auto-rotate you need something that can build inertia on the way down to be used to soften the landing. Unless I really misunderstand how auto-rotation works. ... So I just looked it up and the motor is disengaged during auto-rotation, so it's purely the stored energy in the rotor that's used. So definitely not going to work with the super-light blades on drones this size. -- Drew |
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Methinks that ... yer physics Gots Cuth. :-)
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I could have just Googled
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=728502 The rotors of a typical quad-rotor drone have very low inertia, and fixed pitch. They'll come to a stop almost immediately if the power fails.Oh yeah, fixed pitch. I completely forgot about that. And in more detail: The reason quadcopters work so well using such cheap parts is the same reason they autorotate only slightly better than a brick. -- Drew |