A Prediction Model of Transient Variable Speed Rotor Performance for Small UAS Propulsion Scalability

This paper is an extension of the first, titled "Experimental Results of Transient Variable Speed Rotor Performance for Small UAS Propulsion Scalability." The material presented in that paper illustrated how rotor inertia is only one input variable that governs the transient response of electrical UAS rotor-motor configurations. To better understand how it and other parameters affect transient time, it is necessary to generate a model. The transient response can be readily modeled using a first principles analysis. However, due to the number of unknown parameters, other modeling methods are needed to develop a representative prediction model such as response surface modeling. This paper presents the second part of a Department of the Army funded research effort that experimentally measured the transient response of different sUAS rotor-motor configurations used for quadcopter applications, in order to predict the effect of scalability on the transient response. In the authors' assessment, this is one of the first papers in the literature, if not the first, dedicated to publishing a transient response prediction model. As mentioned in the first paper, we define the transient response as the settling time between two different "throttle," or electrical power settings.