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Ducted Fan Tricopter

Posted by Ed Kirk on February 8, 2012 at 5:00pm

I have been experimenting with a ducted fan tricopter.  It flys much better then I thought it would, flying time is about 5 minutes on a 4 cell 3300mah battery.  It is a blast to fly.

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Comments

  • Ellison Chan February 9, 2012 at 3:20pm

    You'd need an extra channel for each additional edf that swivels.  Right now, the max is 8 channels for an octo.  So the best you can get is 4 edfs with swivel servos.  The code should be relatively simple.  We would just have to replace the yaw part of the code to drive a servo instead of adjusting the motor speed.

    But there's no point, if the efficiency issue is not addressed.  Four edf's mean there's four times more efficiency loss.  You might not even be able to fly for more than a minute on a typical battery.

  • Brian Boatright February 9, 2012 at 2:58pm

    that would be very COOL. Can the existing software accommodate one or more of the motors changing orientation like that?

  • Benjamin Trapnell February 9, 2012 at 2:55pm

    I would think that putting the effort into the development of very lightweight shrouds for tri or quad copters might be more cost and efficiency effective. Conventional EDF's are extremely inefficient, especially when flown at extremely slow speeds (hovering?).  Now if you could get the EDF's to transition from hover to level flight; that would be a cool trick.

  • Janne Mäntyharju February 9, 2012 at 2:49am

    Sounds like the are awful lot of mosquitoes around

  • Developer
    John Arne Birkeland February 9, 2012 at 1:47am

    Next step, jet turbines.. :)

  • avionics February 8, 2012 at 10:06pm

    Well Done Ed, this was in my head for a long time and I am glad somebody had the courage to put into action.

    great work and good luck.

  • Ellison Chan February 8, 2012 at 10:00pm

    In defence or edf's, they are good generating high thrust, and of course are less prone to influence by turbulent air. (i.e. wind)  They're just not very good at generating efficient lift for quads.  If only there was a way to make them more efficient.

  • Moderator
    Gary Mortimer February 8, 2012 at 9:50pm

    They are great at converting energy into noise

  • David February 8, 2012 at 8:42pm

    Awesome! Good work sir.

  • Jack Crossfire February 8, 2012 at 8:38pm

    The cost of crashing an EDF keeps the popularity down.

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