When it is necessary to operate an UAV during several hours, it becomes a must to use a motor able to provide high autonomy and reliability. These features are typical in the electric injection engine, especially in those motors that include an alternator able to charge the UAV batteries used to power the rest of payload and other devices.
Features of the electric injection engine with alternator
Using an electric injection engine, the fuel consumption is reduced around 25% – 30%, which provides higher autonomy to the UAV. Regarding the reliability of this kind of motors, it is remarkable that they can maintain their performance at heights where other motors are completely inefficient. With all these improvements in the UAV performance, not only the height range is enhanced for any mission but it also provides higher integrity in the most common operations.
Sometimes it might be necessary to maintain the UAV gliding in order to raise its autonomy or, if required by the kind of mission to perform, to reduce the noise it does almost completely. For this purpose, an electric injection engine could turn the motor off while flying and turn it on again when needed. Besides the said functionality, an UAV using an electric injection engine improves its reliability avoiding any failure due to turbulences, sudden pressure changes, inefficient carburation due to altitude changes and so on.
UAVs using an electric injection engine together with an alternator are able to highly increase their autonomy, since they are capable to reduce their payload weight and volume. In long air flights, if it is required to power servos, gimbal, control system, radio and others, it would be necessary to use too heavy batteries for the required power consumption, but when using an alternator in the UAV motor, a single small and light battery would be enough since it would be constantly recharged during the flight.
Electric injection engine in the UAV NM& F300
The fixed wing UAV NM& F300 embeds an electric injection engine with an alternator. With a motor of this kind, the NM& F300 is able to perform high speed flights with vertical climbs and descents maneuvers, simulating a ballistic unit. This is also possible thanks to the use of Veronte Autopilot in this UAV.
Veronte Autopilot permits to obtain telemetry about the motor temperature, its revolutions and so on through the control unit of the electric injection engine, controlling it in order to optimize the autonomy as well as providing higher reliability with configurable maneuvers in case of any error / failure.