Students of NSTU NETI Aircraft Faculty created a new aerial vehicle which combines the capabilities of the usual quadrocopter and aircraft. The first tests of the development took place in early April. In addition to the four lifting screws, the drone has wings, tail, and a fifth screw that pushes the quadcopter forward. In an English speaking environment such devices are called "wingcopters" The wingcopter takes off like a normal drone and switches to airplane mode of horizontal flight after climbing. At this point, the lifting screws are turned off, which leads to significant energy saving.
"A simple multicopter is very limited in range of a flight. It lacks speed and battery use efficiency. The main advantage of our development is its hybrid scheme. It can be viewed from different perspectives: as a plane with the possibility of multicopter takeoff, or as a multicopter with the possibility of switching to airplane mode. According to calculations, this solution will allow the drone to significantly increase the speed and range of the flight compared to the usual multicopters", said Sergei Salenko, Doctor of Technical Sciences, the Dean of NSTU NETI Aircraft Faculty and the Project Manager.
"Now many people are trying to use quadrocopters to deliver small loads, but the problem is that traditional drones are very inefficient in horizontal flight. They cannot glide, so they have to spend most of the energy not on the flight itself, but simply to keep the drone in the air. This greatly limits the range and speed of the flight, because the batteries stored energy is limited," says Ilya Zverkov, the scientific consultant of the project, Professor of Aircraft and Helicopter Department of NSTU explaining the idea of the engineering solution.
We proposed a new aerodynamic design with five screws for the wingcopter, with one of the screws pushing the aircraft forward. All of them work from the same battery. "Now the development of such hybrids is very popular. There are two main ways: with rotating screws, as on the famous American military tiltrotor V-22 Osprey, and with separate lifting screws and the pushing one. The main weight of the power unit falls on the batteries. Therefore, the excess engine does not significantly change the overall apparatus weight, there is not much difference whether 4 or 5 screws it will have, but the lifting and traction propulsion systems can be more precisely optimized for the performed task. The use of the fifth screw allows abandoning the complex and unreliable rotary mechanism, as well as using a special screw of a smaller diameter for horizontal flight, which gives an advantage in speed and efficiency," explains Ilya Zverkov.
The prototype of the wingcopter weighs 7.7 kilograms and has a wingspan of 203.4 cm. It will be able to lift a load of 2.5 kg and carry it at a speed of 70 km/h at a distance of 75 km. For comparison, modern cargo multicopters with the same take-off weight carry similar loads at a speed of 75 km/h and at a distance of not more than 15 km.
The first test flight of the tiltrotor took place in early April. In the tests' video, the prototype was secures by special cables for safety reasons.
The wingcopter is fully developed, manufactured and assembled by NSTU students Vasily Markin, Otto Schmidt, Alexander Kiselev, Vladimir Emelyanov and Konstantin Yashmanov within the large-scale project activities which began at the University in 2018. Additive technologies were widely used in the construction. Aircraft Faculty teachers helped only with advice and controlled the quality of work. Tests of the wingcopter will be held in the summer of 2019.