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> Drones aren’t necessarily electric That's very interesting. What are current (commercially viable) alternatives to electric drones?
by bitcharmer 3y ago
> Drones aren’t necessarily electric
That's very interesting. What are current (commercially viable) alternatives to electric drones?
- Retric 3y agoGasoline or kerosene seem to be popular in R&D projects. Read up in the Nitro Stingray or Yeair Hybrid Quad.
- myself248 3y agoJust search "drone engine" or "UAV engine", there are tons of fuel-powered engines (many optimized for JP-8 since the military likes to be single-fuel) made for planes of various sizes. The larger ones tend to have an electric generator to power the control surfaces, smaller drones tend to carry a battery for that and use the engine solely for forward propulsion. This is for fixed-wing only, so it would apply to Zipline P1 but not P2, by the way. There have been some engine-over-electric setups to run multirotors from a single powerplant, but it's generally awful. It may or may not work for hybrid architectures like a quadplane, or a single-engine-VTOL like a tailsitter, all these things are in active development.