Task 1 Recap:
Changed ESC yesterday to account for possible ESC issues on failing motor (via 2023-05-05 Practice Flight @ Airstrip & Daily Debrief ). During hover test drone continued to have rear-right motor fail and dip, forcing flight termination
Happened first time in about 2 min of hover, team came back, removed wings to reduce weight, had the same issue again after 2-3 min of hover
Realized motors might be failing because VTOL motors aren’t rated to be run at 100% throttle for continuous amounts of time since they transition.
the spec is “full current for 3 minutes”
we assumed we’d transition so didn’t need to worry about this
Solutions Brainstorming:
Deduced that high drone weight as well as continuous motor operation at high throttle causing problems
Will be shaving a lot of weight off the Icarus aircraft in order to reduce load on motors, ditch quadplane/transition mode
Remove tail-section
Remove pusher prop
Remove mid-wings
Shave aluminum down
Aim to reduce weight to <10 kg
Find other motors to increase thrust and prevent VTOL motor overheating (perhaps Vanny motors) in 6 or 8-motor configuration. Can also use just 4 Vanny motors
If sub 6 kg, use Vanny motors, otherweise see if we can use other motors from other teams
Action Items
Megan Spee Conall Kingshott Nathan Green Anthony Luo : Working on shaving off aircraft weight
Ethan Abraham looking at datasheet for VTOL as well as Vanny motors to see thrust and continuous operation characteristics
Dhruv Upadhyay Hamza Ali Ayoung Eun : Working on post-flight report
Aidan Bowers (Deactivated) : Working on log analysis and graphs