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Successful flight test of hybrid gas+electric VTOL UAV: HYBRiX

Posted by jlcortex on November 18, 2015 at 11:00am

This is the crazy project that kept us busy lately at Quaternium: a hybrid electric+gas multirotor with range extender, inspired by Hybrid cars, such as BMWi3.

Our goal is to overcome the endurance limitations of an electric multicopter, while keeping the multirotor platform we are so enthusiastic about. This VTOL UAV has 2.5 hr estimated flight time with payload, and around 4 hours endurance otherwise.

These are the product specs:

HYBRIX 20

MTOW	20.0 KG
EMPTY WEIGHT	11.3 KG
PAYLOAD	7.0 KG
ENDURANCE (FULL LOAD)	1.4 HR
ENDURANCE (NO PAYLOAD)	2.7 HR
CRUISE SPEED	80 KM/HR
SIZE (MOTOR TO MOTOR)	1350 MM

Why are we working on this?

As you all know, the drone market is only starting. We believe there will be many more industrial applications emerging soon. With this new project, we seek to go beyond current technology limits and explore new possibilities of application.

What do you think about it? I’d love to hear your comments on this!

jlcortex

www.quaternium.com

uav, vtol, drone, electric, gas, hybrid, multirotor

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Comments

Lorenzo Natividad August 21, 2016 at 11:13pm

I hope you guys can make one that's waterproof!
Lorenzo Natividad August 21, 2016 at 11:00pm

Great! I sent you guys an email over an hour ago :) Let's talk :)
jlcortex August 21, 2016 at 10:50pm

Yes Lorenzo! We have some customers for search and rescue:
Lorenzo Natividad August 21, 2016 at 10:01pm

This will be really good for search and rescue.
jlcortex March 12, 2016 at 1:09pm

I have published a new post with last news:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/updates-of-hybrix-multi-rotor-b...
Luke Wijnberg December 16, 2015 at 8:45pm

Good luck guys, it really looks promising and I wish you all the best with further development. It will be interesting to see what you come up with. Perhaps this is the future for more industrial, working RPAS.
jlcortex December 16, 2015 at 2:56am

Thanks Joe!
Joe Renteria December 14, 2015 at 5:37pm

Outstanding work.
Rob_Lefebvre December 12, 2015 at 10:39am

Oh, I'm quite sure it's possible with gas helicopter too. I was just curious because doing it on 2.7L would mean that it is very efficient. I expect this would have lower total system efficiency than a helicopter because you have two mechanical/electrical conversions, and less disk area.

I expect mine would fly about 1.5 hours on 2.7L, so if you did 3+, that would be mind bendingly efficient.

Are you with-holding details on how much fuel this took? I'm just curious.

End of the day, this is a fantastic achievement. Demonstrating that gas power can be used for a multirotor to achieve extended flight times is really great. I think you're the first to show how this can really be done. Everybody is always holding out hope for this elusive battery technology breakthrough, but there is nothing really on the horizon. Gas power is here, today.
jlcortex December 12, 2015 at 9:48am

No, we have increased the fuel to make this 3hours, are you doing calculations?

I am absolutely sure than this experience is possible with helicopters. There are helicopters with 2 stroke engines with 6 hours of flight time. I remember to see this number in Cybaero Apid 50 or helicopters like this.

if you do the math accurately you will see it is possible, the problem is that you have to get all efficiencies in a reasonable values in a very lightweight and it is very easy to get very bad values somewhere in the system.

The first time I did a test with a generator the results were extremely bad, same when we calculate the consumption of the engine for the first time. The key is to believe in number and not your experience.