Its a large heli, so you can fit a large battery, but lets just say the controller amounted to a good amount of that flight time.
Yes, the trike is dead silent in terms of chain noise, is just the C3000W motor that has the F-1 whine when you punch it and rip through the gears... which I kinda like too... makes me feel I am doing 160!
but the FOC controller will make it even more silent so even more stealth...
better!! although I won't get my F-1 sound tho
It is indeed good to know the ceramics make a noticeable difference, thanks for that tip; I wasn't sure if it would be worth the $$$$ at such low RPM...
Yeah, the efficiency game is a tedious one to play, but the aero was the biggest win for the lowest amount of money... just a few dollars worth of plastic...
heat gun and molds did the trick. Why add more power when you can just lower the requirements to get there, right? I might take the plunge and get some ceramics bearings... worth a try, and nowadays they are fairly cheap
CF is also on my list to do, but this is just for a shell, I have no plans on doing anything structural on home made CF; and while I got really good at thermoforming panels, and love the simplicity of it and the no-mess process... you end up adding more weight than you probably should, but is easy to repair and nearly indestructible...
No aluminum here, I went with a steel frame, and that was a MUST in the initial design choices when I set out to build the trike; I would never dare to use any commercial grade AL alloy on a 60+ mph trike without doing a long FEA study.. as AL fatigues with vibration and steel doesn't (so FEA is much less of a requirement so over-engineering works in this case) and its a lot springier too; one can abuse the snot out of the frame without it ever cracking due to fatigue... that was another reason why I built the body around it, to prevent water and other crap from getting in.
Motor... trike can (theoretically) already hit ~70 mph on ~6kW, so there is no need to get a bigger motor, trust me. The trike also runs 90A peaks at shunt, (unknown phase amps since I shunt modded the thing), so its stupid quick too, faster than cars if that answers the question; but what I need now is need a more efficient controller, so it will require less amps to do the same speed, which equals longer range. Me wants the combination of a "Chevy Volt efficiency", "Go-Kart performance" and "F-1 looks" long though mutually exclusive...
5% efficiency isn't a priority when you're dealing with already super efficient vehicles (compared to gas guzzling cars) but when want to push 50 miles out of 1 kWh averaging ~30 MPH speed (not cruise, average) all motor, every percent you can shave counts, kinda like the ceramic bearings.
You seem to know your way around these controllers really well, what programming language do you use for the MCU? C++?
G.
ElectricGod said:
An hour worth of flight time is a giant battery pack! I'm sure the controller helped in some small way to extend flight times. Still a giant battery pack is the only reason why you can fly for an hour. If people are forced to land due to ESC overheating, that's due to an under powered or cheap ESC or both. I used to fly electric heli's and planes. Honestly, I'm surprised you could get that large of a pack in a heli. In a plane I can see it happening since they are much more efficient fliers.
I bet your trike is quieter with no tubes for the chain to rattle inside of all the time. I use ceramic balled bearings in just about everything. All steel bearings are cheap and common and are better than no bearing, but the difference between ceramic balls and steel balls is quite significant. I have a stack of ceramic balled bearings on my bench right now so that I can pull the steel bearings out of several motors and replace them. The friction reduction between ceramic balled and all ceramic bearings IMHO isn't worth the cost, but going from shielded steel to sealed ceramic balled bearings is a significant frictional improvement. As a result, every bearing that is steel and shielded or sealed, gets replaced with sealed ceramic balled bearings. It all helps! Do I get 40mph on steel bearings and 45 mph on ceramics? No, but it helps a little. I've got quite a few new shielded bearings that I replaced with sealed ceramic bearings. You can feel the difference just spinning the bearing in your fingers. IMHO ceramic balled bearings are worth it.
CF...this is on my list of things to get into. Making your own CF components isn't overly difficult. It's just an air compressor/vacuum pump, bags, CF sheets, epoxy and shapes to mold around. The challenge is joining CF to metal and having it be strong. You can't really thread into CF so that means brass or stainless threaded inserts for things that need to bolt on. Also CF doesn't take getting bashed into things particularly well. A friend of mine has 4 CF bikes right now that all weigh right at 15 pounds. He's also had 5 more before them that were involved in various wrecks and had to be retired due to frame cracking. Once CF gets a crack in it, you are going to be doing major rework if it's a structural component. It's just an opinion, but I'd use CF for things where I don't expect any physical impact to happen and then aluminum for everything else.
If your trike is already aluminum, I'd leave it alone and go with a bigger motor, pack and controller if your speed and acceleration are not good enough yet. Of course getting away from a motor that uses planets (cyclone) is an excellent idea too. There's lots of inrunners and outrunners out there that have no need of planetary gears to be used on an EV. I get why people use the cyclone. It's already geared down to human pedaling cadences so it makes implementation easy, but there are other options too that are better. I'm looking at building a quad bike based on the Utah Trikes quad set up. My motor will drive the back wheels directly. It's possible I might use a 2 or 3 speed transmission. I won't use the human powered components at all for electric drive. It is highly likely that it will have a PowerVelocity controller on it since they do work quite well on inrunners and outrunners and not just hub motors.
Another direction I am going in soon is the micro EV. I've already picked out the machine I want to build onto. It's a Lehe K1S. Front and rear suspension and disk brakes come standard. I'm thinking a 6 or 12 fet PV controller, a C80100 outrunner and run it all at 66 volts. It might be a good home for my ASI controller as well. I'm quite sure that with single stage gearing I can exceed 40mph and accelerate as well as my GTI. My Currie on this exact setup and 75 pounds will do that. This project would be about keeping the EV weight at 40 pounds max, achieve 40mph+ and have 15-20 miles of range of pure electric power.
Before either of these things happen, I'm going to program the ASI controller for my Currie/C80100 outrunner and see if I find it giving me the "OMG!! This is so much better than my PV controller!" feel. I always do a standard tune on any controller that will work and then tweak the settings for optimal performance. The 12 fet PV will get a bit more of that over this weekend. I'll get the ASI set up to be a plug in replacement that I can strap down to the top of the Currie back deck. The PV 12 fet will have been optimally tuned and seen at least 2 full battery charges by then or about 50 miles. I'll then install the ASI in place of the 12 fet PV and see what happens. I'm not the least bit hung on one opinion or the other, but I have to say that the ASI for 2X the price is going to need to really impress me. A 5% improvement for 2X the cost isn't compelling IMHO. In either case, I will continue to promote the PowerVelocity product line as a great, reasonably priced, middle of the road controller option.
So far I've used the 12 fet controllers the most since I have 3 of them and fried one due to my own errors. The 18 fet version is running strong, but has yet to see real load testing and tweaking since that EV isn't finished yet. It will initially run at 82 volts, but I may bump that to 130 volts. OR I will swap out it's IRF4115 mosfets for AOT290's and keep it at 82 volts. If I go to AOT290's, I will be able to bump phase and battery amps significantly and that will exceed the HLD/LR big block inrunners capabilities that I'm using on the XB-502 moped. I have my eye on it's big brother already. My battery/BMS solution is already capable of 160 amps continuous and 32,000mah capacity. I have just received the 24 fet PV controller which will probably get used in the quad bike and will run an Alien Power 12090 50kv outrunner. I'm expecting something like 15kw out of the motor. It will be quite strong! In that build, I will also have the option to compare the 24 fet Sabvoton MQCON controller. Again we will see if FOC is a mind blow or not. 5% improvement isn't going to get me to switch for most uses.