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Wednesday, September 13, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Oregon team develops engine to keep drones aloft longer
By Joseph Ditzler
The Bulletin
BEND (AP) — A team led
by an engineering professor
at Oregon State University-
Cascades has developed a
prototype hybrid engine for
small, unmanned aerial vehi-
cles, in what could be a sig-
nificant development in drone
technology.
Unmanned aerial vehicles,
known as drones, and par-
ticularly small drones, are
often limited by the amount
of battery power. A hybrid
engine, using a gasoline-
powered engine to re-charge
an onboard battery, allows the
vehicle to stay aloft longer.
Chris Hagen, OSU-
Cascades assistant professor
of energy systems engineer-
ing, and his team managed to
scale down the concept, open-
ing the possibility of a viable
hybrid engine for “smalls”
— drones that weigh less
than 55 pounds — said Mark
Peters, research compliance
coordinator with OSU in
Corvallis.
“Dr. Hagen brings a con-
cept proven in hybrid vehi-
cles and larger aircraft and
miniaturizes it,” Peters said
Wednesday. “It opens up the
door to extending and enhanc-
ing the usability of small
rotorcraft in research, search
and rescue and all those dif-
ferent applications that are
restrained by a battery pack.”
Previously, Hagen con-
ceived of and developed at
OSU a natural-gas-powered
engine that also compresses
natural gas, an advance that
led to creation of a company,
Onboard Dynamics, in Bend,
to commercialize the project.
Onboard Dynamics partnered
with Southern California Gas
Co. in January to demonstrate
the engine as a more efficient
means of refueling natural-
gas-fueled school buses.
As for the hybrid engine
for small drones, that work
began two years ago, Hagen
said. The technology existed
Keeping a lookout...
in its component parts; the
challenge lay in bringing them
together to work as a system,
he said.
“The integration ended up
being a lot more difficult than
I expected,” Hagen said Aug.
17. “Although all the stuff
exists, you have to basically
tailor each one of these com-
ponents so they consume the
right amount (of energy) and
they send off the right amount
of energy.”
Hagen and his team, which
included Sean Brown, for-
merly an OSU engineering
graduate student and now an
associate engineer at SpaceX,
and Shyam Menon, formerly
an OSU engineering professor
who now teaches at Louisiana
State University, pulled com-
ponents off the shelf, starting
with a Tarot-brand quadcop-
ter. The team today includes
a group of undergraduates at
OSU-Cascades, Hagen said.
For power, Hagen’s team
purchased a small, one-cyl-
inder, two-stroke engine that
produces 2.75 horsepower.
The German-made engine, a
3W28i, is commonly used in
radio-controlled aircraft, said
Gerhard Stejskal, owner of
Aircraft International LLC,
the Florida-based importer
that supplied the engine.
Hagen’s team used its
The fi x is...
engine to power a genera-
tor that charges the batteries
that run the electric motors
attached to the drone propel-
lers. Although simple in con-
cept, attempts to bring it to
reality proved elusive, Hagen
said.
“We’ve flown for over an
hour, and documented that
— an hour and 3 minutes,”
he said. “Other people have
made these claims but we
haven’t seen them do it.”
Actually flying the craft
is a sometimes thing, he
said. It typically “flies” while
attached to a set of rails that
allows it to rise and fall in a
relatively safe environment.
The otherwise modest-looking
craft has more than $230,000
invested in it, in terms of
equipment, a NASA fellow-
ship for Brown and the work
of at least six other people,
Hagen said. A qualified com-
mercial pilot from Corvallis
sometimes crosses the moun-
tains to fly the drone, he said.
“We’ve been at it a couple
of years, and we flew five or
six times longer than the best
battery system,” Hagen said.
“We did it just the other day.”
Peters said the hybrid
system, on display at the
Oregon UAS Summit and
Expo in early August in Bend,
attracted prospective users’
attention. He declined to
identify the interested parties
or what applications they had
in mind. Other possible next
steps include interesting the
U.S. Defense Department, the
National Science Foundation
or other organizations in help-
ing advance the technology,
he said.
“Bend has a jewel in Dr.
Hagen. He’s a researcher and
an innovator that’s helped out
a lot of Bend companies,”
Peters said. “He’s a great guy
to have around.”
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