Design and characterization of Hover Nano Aerial Vehicle (HNAV) propulsion system

On October 4th 2005, DARPA released a request for proposals for a Nano-Air Vehicle (NAV) program. The program sought to develop an advanced urban reconnaissance vehicle. According the requirement imposed by DARPA, the NAV was to have dimensions smaller than 7.5 cm in diameter, and a weight of approximately 10 grams, to allow indoor operation. On top of these requirements, this vehicle was to operate for about 20 minutes, and have a low noise signature to avoid risk of detection. This thesis addresses the propulsion system required to enable the DARPA NAV. In particular, a rotary-wing vehicle is favored because of its high efficiency and simplicity. One large challenge faced for this design is the torque canceling mechanism to counter the torque produced by the rotating rotor. To provide a reasonable torque canceling, the solution proposed here is to use a rotating motor inside the vehicle. One rotor will be attached to the shaft of the motor and the other to a motor body that is left free to rotate inside the vehicle. By letting the motor rotate freely inside the body, the torque is cancelled automatically without a gearbox. In addition to this passive torque canceling mechanism, a novel approach is used in the fabrication approach of the motor in order to maximize the power density of this propulsion system. This new fabrication method involves the use of flexible printed circuit for the stator of the motor, which allows for the motor to achieve high power density, while simplifying its manufacturing process. The main goal of this project is to combine these two novel approaches in order to design, fabricate and assess the performance of the proposed propulsion system design. In this thesis, a prototype propulsion system for this vehicle, featuring the new motor fabrication approach, is designed, fabricated and tested.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Sato, Sho, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mark Drela and Jeffrey H. Lang.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44925

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44925