What a great achievement Oskar. Good on you for persevering to this point. Loved your great article written for KiwiFlyer. Hoping this develops into an exciting and possibly lucrative venture for you. Subbed and keen to follow your progress here on YT.
Great job Oskar. It immediately reminded me the recently presented Bell 429 EDAT. Can't wait to see more videos of your helicopter. Greetings from Poland!
With the proof of concept that an electric motor works, you could use a small engine generator to run it. That should really reduce maintenance costs and if your engine gives out go to the market and buy a new one.... well provided you live after the landing. Might still consider a battery pack with enough power to let you land. Scale the concept up to Sikorsky CH-53K territory.
Sounded like someone with Dutch or German as mothertongue speaking English, but the landscape and the sky look like NZ. Other videos feature waste/recycling bins from a company in Auckland, where there is more than a handful of South Africans.
Weirdest tail rotor I've ever seen... but an amazing test. Total control, no big vibrations, excellent. I must say I was a bit skeptical at the beginning of the video :)
Fantastic. It's amazing how fast the rotor heat spools up to speed. As of now what weight category would your helicopter fit in ? Also is that a cog tooth belt being used ? Thank you ...
The secondary reduction uses a toothed belt, it is standard Mosquito from Composite FX. The aircraft is registered in New Zealand as a microlight. Aircraft with one or two seats that have a MTOW or less than 600kg can be registered as microlight over here.
There's no gyro, but there is feed forward control similar to a throttle correlator. If the main rotor torque increases the controller automatically increases tail rotor thrust.
For the main rotor: Hover power is 21kW and the batteries are 7.8kWh. That works out to 22 minutes of hover time. Hopefully power goes down lots above translational lift, still have to measure that. For the tail rotor: During tethered tests the tail power was 1.2kW with the tail battery good for about 25 minutes. In untethered test it was found that left pedal turns can require more than 2kW, under those conditions the tail rotor battery will need to be a bit bigger to get the same endurance as the main rotor battery.
@@OskarRDA - thanks for the info. It's very interesting. I wouldn't have thought of having a separate battery for the tail but I don't think it's a bad idea. I think I would want the tail to last longer than the main rotor. That brings up another question. You're obviously using rotor rpm to control lift on the tail rotor. Will the motors reverse themselves if needed? I'm thinking of an autorotation situation where there's no torque to take the nose opposite of the main rotor direction. Also, and this is just out of curiosity, but what voltage levels are you using when fully charged? I fly electric powered RC helicopters using a 12 cell Lipo battery pack that's at 50.4 volts when fully charged, only those models are only good for 5 to 8 minutes of flight time, depending on how we're flying it, but we're going things you 1:1 scale guys can only dream of. ;-)
@@Intrepid175a I've experimeted with tail reversing, but first tests are without to see how necessary it is. Check out the video on simulated engine out in the hover. Tail battery is 6S, main 96S.
@@OskarRDA - I found your short video doing the throttle chop in a low hover. There was a nice little left yaw going on in spite of the pilot standing on the right peddle. I'd have to see how that works out coming down from altitude. I've flown models that didn't drive the tail rotor in an autorotation so the tail stops turning very shortly after the power is cut. If you're nose to the wind it's not too bad. On a relatively calm day, the nose starts swing in the direction of rotor rotation about half way through the flare and there's nothing the pilot can do about it. In the modeling world, it's not that big a deal most of the time but on a 1:1 scale bird??
@@Intrepid175a You're right, I've also done lots of 3D RC heli flying with freewheeling tail and auto touchdowns are a bit more tricky. From the perspective of the guy sitting in the seat of the 1:1, so far I haven't found anything that feels uncontrollable or uncomfortable. When initially testing tail motor reversal the cons outweighed the pros, might have to revisit at some stage but suspect it won't be necessary.
Damn.. Any details of how you change the pitch of the blades? Is this a traditional swashplate? I think i've got what it takes to make one of these kicking around
I take it a single electric motor turning a "stock" tail rotor wouldn't do the trick? Excellent job., BTW. Edit: Never mind. I see the answer a bit down the line. :-)
Hover power is 21kW and the batteries are 7.8kWh. That works out to 22 minutes of hover time. Hopefully power goes down lots above translational lift, still have to measure that.
Did you manage to compare the torque ratio between the electric main motor vs the Rotax Petrol Engine. Ever think about a hybrid design using battery / electric tail rotor and a petrol engine to increase time and range? The alternator can also assist in providing some charge to the tail rotor batteries.
On paper the petrol engine has more power and torque. In real life the electric flies much nicer, so nice that I never want to fly petrol again. A hybrid solution will be too heavy.
You know those Mosquito guys don’t sell ultralight choppers anymore. You have to go experimental if you want to deal with them. Not sure what you have to do if you want spare parts.
Hi oskar, You mentioned it consumed 21kw, upon checking the specs for that 228 motor designed for 109kw the graph puts 21kw at 60nm of torque. do you think this motor is too big? could you have used the smaller motor continuous rated for 41kw and 80nm torque, with a peak of 68kw & 140nm ?
I run a LC (liquid cooled only) motor at 2450rpm. At that speed maximum continuous power is about 27kW. Hover power is 21kW, but I program the peak power at 29kW. After reading the cooling small print you will find that the EMRAX 228 is just about perfect for this application.
@@OskarRDA Max continuous flying power for your 230kg load at 27kw at 2450rpm was 84NM of torque. a rotor speed of 540rpm. that's a continuous lift to weight ratio of 2.73NM/KG. Hover power at 21kw at 1850rpm is 63NM with a rotor speed of 408rpm. A hover lift to weight ratio of 3.65NM/KG Considering the 228 motor has a continuous rated torque to power rate of 180NM of torque at 60kw. Assuming the helicopter was empty to hover it would use approx 41nm of torque and 14kw at 1250rpm. at 150kg. During hover you use 35% of its torque and 47% continuously. Even factoring a further 2% loss for running the motor at 5000rpm. There's still 50% of motor rated power and torque. You could double the main cog and increase the continuous speed and flight time.
That's is a great mod but we need to wait a little more for a new Generation batteries that will give us more flight time. Then I will convert my heli to electric.
Hi Oskar - fabulous man - i have been thinking about buying this kid and convert it to electric flying - but I am no engineer and would love to know what king of electric motor I would need - the requiered horsepower - batterypack - tailrotor motor (s) why so many - why not just one ?? ect ect. love to hear from you . Q: Is john Uptogrove still alive or not??Thanks for sharing this . Rudi
Hi Rudi, You will find the answers to all your questions and more in the comments of the "Electric helicopter with electric tail rotor testing" video in this channel. John is unfortunately not with us any more.
@@OskarRDA That one will be a very interesting test. I reckon the conventional auto on my machine has a descent of about 1350fpm, what was the air like before in its autos?
@@grevis101 The bit in the middle is not as interesting as the start and the finish. That is where you don't want anything slowing down the rotors unnecessarily. For the middle bit the math says that saving 1400W (which the mechanical tail rotor was robbing at zero thrust) means reducing the decent rate by 120fpm.
@@OskarRDA Another question, full right pedal on the original tail rotor had a little bit of negative pitch, has your setup got reverse on the tail drone controllers
At the moment there is only one in the world, and it is being used for test flights. But it's just a question of time before they become freely available.
I hope it can record some battery fire before dozens of people die in those stupid Uber aiire taxis trying to use lipos ....if lithium doesn't catch fire then tell me why ..glider pilot 35 years and I've had plenty of electrics ....solid state batteries are the only way but we don't have that yet ...
You're right, the batteries are very dangerous. In this helicopter the battery management and monitoring system cost just as much as the battery, for me it's the most important piece of equipment on board.
The motor is an EMRAX 228. The battery capacity is 7.8kWh. When hovering the power required is 21kW, so the battery will last 7.8/21 hours = 22 minutes. When flying just above ETL (about 20km/h) the power required is 17kW, so the battery will last 7.8/17 hours = 27 minutes.
Спорт
I think I would be wearing a helmet flying that one.
I don’t think a helmet would protect enough you on that thing
Lmao because the helmet is ganna stop those blades XD
What a great achievement Oskar. Good on you for persevering to this point. Loved your great article written for KiwiFlyer. Hoping this develops into an exciting and possibly lucrative venture for you. Subbed and keen to follow your progress here on YT.
Man I love this. You could scale up an Align Trex 700 and have a killer 20 minute flight. Performance out the wahzoo!
Forgot to mention what an awesome display of engineering and EV possibilities. Well done!
Awesome tail rotor.. great job
Great job Oskar. It immediately reminded me the recently presented Bell 429 EDAT. Can't wait to see more videos of your helicopter. Greetings from Poland!
You can now read the full story about this helicopter at www.hfpower.co.nz/Oskacopter.pdf
Excellent film footage and sound.
Nice! Flying into the news!
Very cool, I'll take two please!
Brilliant. well done! must be so nice not to have the horrible 2 stroke engine vibrations and torque spikes.
Not having the noise is even better!
Wow, FULL electric AND electric tail rotor? Didn't see that coming
Good. Love this.
With the proof of concept that an electric motor works, you could use a small engine generator to run it. That should really reduce maintenance costs and if your engine gives out go to the market and buy a new one.... well provided you live after the landing. Might still consider a battery pack with enough power to let you land. Scale the concept up to Sikorsky CH-53K territory.
I would wear a juggernaut suit... just in case
Amazing job dude, but it seems highly dangerous to have your head uncovered
Holy fast take off. You could probably take off in less than 20 seconds from the motor starting
That was the first flight, now that everything is dialled in it takes less than 10 seconds from blades starting to turn to getting airborne.
bro think he is in rust😂
🔥🔥🔥🔥
it only takes 30 seconds to lift......amazing....
This is so awesome, something I was dreaming of doing! Is there a weight advantage switching to the electric drive tail rotor(s)?
I removed 8.1kg and added 7.5kg. The best bit is that the 7.5kg included the tail rotor battery!!
if anything it adds a lot of redundancy.
You can program in collective yaw too!
@@johnosmers4374 really, so you can just climb and descend all you want with no pedal input?
Wow
wow....
Fantastic, was that an Aussie accent I heard at the start?
Sounded like someone with Dutch or German as mothertongue speaking English, but the landscape and the sky look like NZ. Other videos feature waste/recycling bins from a company in Auckland, where there is more than a handful of South Africans.
Weirdest tail rotor I've ever seen... but an amazing test. Total control, no big vibrations, excellent.
I must say I was a bit skeptical at the beginning of the video :)
question is - how long it works on battery
oh, I found it - 15 mins... ridiculous
Es un comienzo, vale, pero ¿pruebas sin casco? si las palas tocan el suelo o con algo, re revuelve como una peonza loca y ¡¡¡se abre la cabeza!!!
Fantastic. It's amazing how fast the rotor heat spools up to speed. As of now what weight category would your helicopter fit in ? Also is that a cog tooth belt being used ? Thank you ...
The secondary reduction uses a toothed belt, it is standard Mosquito from Composite FX.
The aircraft is registered in New Zealand as a microlight. Aircraft with one or two seats that have a MTOW or less than 600kg can be registered as microlight over here.
@@OskarRDAThank you for the reply. Mosquito rotor blades I thought would be hard to get. Keep up the good work I will be watching.
Huge congratulations! What a success! Why do the tail rotors all spin at different speeds?
Thanks, the same signal goes to all the motors but each one has its own controller. Must be slight variances in the controllers.
@@OskarRDA well you proved it works with only 4 of the rotors spinning!
@@GabrielDeVault that is just an artifact of the camera shutter, they are all spinning I think.
Excellent. Why not use a small engine for the main and electric on the back? Then you can have all the automatic stablization on it.
hahaha bravo guys! Less warm up than a turbine!
great work man, what are the components needed?
Thanks, you can read all about it at www.hfpower.co.nz/Oskacopter.pdf
Are the tail motors gyro stabilized or are you controlling the motors with only the pedals?
There's no gyro, but there is feed forward control similar to a throttle correlator. If the main rotor torque increases the controller automatically increases tail rotor thrust.
You can now read the full story about this helicopter at www.hfpower.co.nz/Oskacopter.pdf
Please what's the battery capacity , what type of motor did you use and what power does it draw?
Something tells me if you had the funding and resources, you'd be able to make a larger scale version of this aircraft....
Interesting... an independent rudder.
we no weve come far when a battry can lift us off the floor bikes can travle 40 to 50 mile off a little bat pack..its insane
What's your tail end there buddy
Definitely an interesting tail setup. Wonder what kind of endurance it has? Was that it?
For the main rotor:
Hover power is 21kW and the batteries are 7.8kWh. That works out to 22 minutes of hover time.
Hopefully power goes down lots above translational lift, still have to measure that.
For the tail rotor:
During tethered tests the tail power was 1.2kW with the tail battery good for about 25 minutes. In untethered test it was found that left pedal turns can require more than 2kW, under those conditions the tail rotor battery will need to be a bit bigger to get the same endurance as the main rotor battery.
@@OskarRDA - thanks for the info. It's very interesting. I wouldn't have thought of having a separate battery for the tail but I don't think it's a bad idea. I think I would want the tail to last longer than the main rotor. That brings up another question. You're obviously using rotor rpm to control lift on the tail rotor. Will the motors reverse themselves if needed? I'm thinking of an autorotation situation where there's no torque to take the nose opposite of the main rotor direction. Also, and this is just out of curiosity, but what voltage levels are you using when fully charged? I fly electric powered RC helicopters using a 12 cell Lipo battery pack that's at 50.4 volts when fully charged, only those models are only good for 5 to 8 minutes of flight time, depending on how we're flying it, but we're going things you 1:1 scale guys can only dream of. ;-)
@@Intrepid175a I've experimeted with tail reversing, but first tests are without to see how necessary it is. Check out the video on simulated engine out in the hover.
Tail battery is 6S, main 96S.
@@OskarRDA - I found your short video doing the throttle chop in a low hover. There was a nice little left yaw going on in spite of the pilot standing on the right peddle. I'd have to see how that works out coming down from altitude. I've flown models that didn't drive the tail rotor in an autorotation so the tail stops turning very shortly after the power is cut. If you're nose to the wind it's not too bad. On a relatively calm day, the nose starts swing in the direction of rotor rotation about half way through the flare and there's nothing the pilot can do about it. In the modeling world, it's not that big a deal most of the time but on a 1:1 scale bird??
@@Intrepid175a You're right, I've also done lots of 3D RC heli flying with freewheeling tail and auto touchdowns are a bit more tricky.
From the perspective of the guy sitting in the seat of the 1:1, so far I haven't found anything that feels uncontrollable or uncomfortable. When initially testing tail motor reversal the cons outweighed the pros, might have to revisit at some stage but suspect it won't be necessary.
Damn.. Any details of how you change the pitch of the blades? Is this a traditional swashplate? I think i've got what it takes to make one of these kicking around
The cyclic and collective controls are standard Mosquito, I didn't touch those.
I take it a single electric motor turning a "stock" tail rotor wouldn't do the trick? Excellent job., BTW.
Edit: Never mind. I see the answer a bit down the line. :-)
The biggest question of all what is the endurance?
Hover power is 21kW and the batteries are 7.8kWh. That works out to 22 minutes of hover time.
Hopefully power goes down lots above translational lift, still have to measure that.
Tail rotors
Did you manage to compare the torque ratio between the electric main motor vs the Rotax Petrol Engine. Ever think about a hybrid design using battery / electric tail rotor and a petrol engine to increase time and range? The alternator can also assist in providing some charge to the tail rotor batteries.
On paper the petrol engine has more power and torque.
In real life the electric flies much nicer, so nice that I never want to fly petrol again.
A hybrid solution will be too heavy.
@@OskarRDA Now to get more mileage out of the batteries, is your next challenge, thanks for replying
You know those Mosquito guys don’t sell ultralight choppers anymore. You have to go experimental if you want to deal with them. Not sure what you have to do if you want spare parts.
In New Zealand every aircraft needs to be registered with CAA, the one in the video is ZK-IAB. Plus you need a current helicopter license to fly it.
Really interested to know the specs for the motor, controller, batteries etc if you have time.
Have a look at www.hfpower.co.nz/Oskacopter.pdf
How does the cyclic control work? I can't see any control mechanisms going up to the blades.
The control rods and swashplate are inside the mast. It's a very well engineered system, all the Mosquito helicopters have it.
@@OskarRDA - Thanks. I could see a small mechanism sticking up from the top of the hub, but I wasn't sure if that was it.
Buy this man a helmet?
Is there a sprag clutch on the main rotor?
Yes, it uses the standard Mosquito sprag clutch.
do all of the tail rotors work collectively?
You can read the full story at www.hfpower.co.nz/Oskacopter.pdf
Hi oskar, You mentioned it consumed 21kw, upon checking the specs for that 228 motor designed for 109kw the graph puts 21kw at 60nm of torque. do you think this motor is too big? could you have used the smaller motor continuous rated for 41kw and 80nm torque, with a peak of 68kw & 140nm ?
I run a LC (liquid cooled only) motor at 2450rpm. At that speed maximum continuous power is about 27kW. Hover power is 21kW, but I program the peak power at 29kW. After reading the cooling small print you will find that the EMRAX 228 is just about perfect for this application.
@@OskarRDA Max continuous flying power for your 230kg load at 27kw at 2450rpm was 84NM of torque. a rotor speed of 540rpm.
that's a continuous lift to weight ratio of 2.73NM/KG.
Hover power at 21kw at 1850rpm is 63NM with a rotor speed of 408rpm.
A hover lift to weight ratio of 3.65NM/KG
Considering the 228 motor has a continuous rated torque to power rate of 180NM of torque at 60kw.
Assuming the helicopter was empty to hover it would use approx 41nm of torque and 14kw at 1250rpm. at 150kg.
During hover you use 35% of its torque and 47% continuously.
Even factoring a further 2% loss for running the motor at 5000rpm.
There's still 50% of motor rated power and torque.
You could double the main cog and increase the continuous speed and flight time.
@@OskarRDA Hi Oskar , what did the 228 motor and speed controller cost ?
awesome but no enclosed cockpit is fucking terrifying LOL
Only terrifying if you're watching on YT.
Flying it is AWESOME!!!
That's is a great mod but we need to wait a little more for a new Generation batteries that will give us more flight time. Then I will convert my heli to electric.
I got tired of waiting so decided to have some fun now ;)
Hi Oskar - fabulous man - i have been thinking about buying this kid and convert it to electric flying - but I am no engineer and would love to know what king of electric motor I would need - the requiered horsepower - batterypack - tailrotor motor (s) why so many - why not just one ?? ect ect. love to hear from you . Q: Is john Uptogrove still alive or not??Thanks for sharing this . Rudi
Hi Rudi, You will find the answers to all your questions and more in the comments of the "Electric helicopter with electric tail rotor testing" video in this channel. John is unfortunately not with us any more.
You can now read the full story about this helicopter at www.hfpower.co.nz/Oskacopter.pdf
Please use safety gear
I like it but why not only have one tail rotor?
It's for redundancy. The helicopter will fly with only 4 tail motors running, so loosing one or two is a non event.
@@OskarRDA would an empennage not reduce the need for redundancy and decrease drag?
@@jamessnelling I'll let someone else build one of those, thought about it but ended up putting it into the "too hard" basket.
WTF Anticouple rear motors .. they need more power than the main rotor
It's photoshop! Great job!
Prove it.
A helmet would of put the onboard weight too high.
At least you can autorotate this one unlike the drone VTOL machines.
And it will auto even better than before because the main rotor no longer needs to drive the tail rotor in an auto.
@@OskarRDA That one will be a very interesting test. I reckon the conventional auto on my machine has a descent of about 1350fpm, what was the air like before in its autos?
@@grevis101 The bit in the middle is not as interesting as the start and the finish. That is where you don't want anything slowing down the rotors unnecessarily.
For the middle bit the math says that saving 1400W (which the mechanical tail rotor was robbing at zero thrust) means reducing the decent rate by 120fpm.
@@OskarRDA Another question, full right pedal on the original tail rotor had a little bit of negative pitch, has your setup got reverse on the tail drone controllers
@@grevis101 Have experimented with both. The technicalities are very interesting, much too complex to explain in a RUclips comment.
Como se puede conseguir uno como es. Gracias
It won't work.
I'm very curious to hear why it won't work.
I'll take one and pay with cash. I'm serious. Send me info.
At the moment there is only one in the world, and it is being used for test flights. But it's just a question of time before they become freely available.
You can now read the whole story of the helicopter at www.hfpower.co.nz/Oskacopter.pdf
I hope it can record some battery fire before dozens of people die in those stupid Uber aiire taxis trying to use lipos ....if lithium doesn't catch fire then tell me why ..glider pilot 35 years and I've had plenty of electrics ....solid state batteries are the only way but we don't have that yet ...
You're right, the batteries are very dangerous. In this helicopter the battery management and monitoring system cost just as much as the battery, for me it's the most important piece of equipment on board.
It's not very good.
3 people thumbing this down.. How?
Please what's the battery capacity , what type of motor did you use and what power does it draw?
The motor is an EMRAX 228.
The battery capacity is 7.8kWh.
When hovering the power required is 21kW, so the battery will last 7.8/21 hours = 22 minutes.
When flying just above ETL (about 20km/h) the power required is 17kW, so the battery will last 7.8/17 hours = 27 minutes.
Thanks Mr. Oscar