An Analytical Design-Optimization Method for Electric Propulsion Systems of Multicopter UAVs With Desired Hovering Endurance

• Published in: IEEE/ASME transactions on mechatronics Vol. 24; no. 1; pp. 228 - 239
• Main Authors: Dai, Xunhua, Quan, Quan, Ren, Jinrui, Cai, Kai-Yuan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Batteries; Design; Design engineering; Design optimization; Electric propulsion; Endurance; Hovering; Mathematical model; multicopter; Parameters; Propellers; propulsion system; Propulsion system design; Servers; Statistical analysis; unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
• ISSN: 1083-4435; 1941-014X
• DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2019.2890901

Multicopters are becoming increasingly important both in civil and military fields. Currently, most multicopter propulsion systems are designed by experience and trial-and-error experiments, which are costly and ineffective. This paper proposes a simple and practical method to help designers find the optimal propulsion system according to the given design requirements. First, the modeling methods for four basic components of the propulsion system including propellers, motors, electric speed controls, and batteries are studied, respectively. Second, the whole optimization design problem is simplified and decoupled into several subproblems. By solving these subproblems, the optimal parameters of each component can be obtained, respectively. Finally, based on the obtained optimal component parameters, the optimal product of each component can be quickly located and determined from the corresponding database. Experiments and statistical analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed method is so fast and practical that it has been successfully applied to a web server to provide online optimization design service for users.