Brushless DC (BLCD) Motor Test-Stand focused for Drone environments

27 Oct.,2022

 

Drone Motor Test Stand

If you have ever worked in an academic environment you might know that there are students and then there are STUDENTS :-). I mean these kind of students who are really interested into the project and incorporate their own ideas, one of the rare varieties…..  A year ago one of this rare varieties volunteered for one of my projects…. yeah

If you have ever worked in an academic environment you might know that there are students and then there are STUDENTS :-). I mean these kind of students who are really interested into the project and incorporate their own ideas, one of the rare varieties….. A year ago one of this rare varieties volunteered for one of my projects…. yeah

The goal was to build a BLCD Motor Test-Stand to measure how electric current and buoyancy are changing on several different motor propeller combinations. The motor/props tests are mainly focused for usage with Quadrocopter like vehicles. Furthermore Amir (Godfather of Quadrocopters)
came up with the idea to measure the Tau63 for the PT1 transmission behavior.

The software part is entirely written in G (LabVIEW).  For data acquisition we used the NI PCI-6024E interfaced via DAQmx.

With DAQmx you can set up your measurement hardware very easily (see next snippet).

Measured signals are:

Sampling rate = 10kHz

  • BLC- Ctrl. Phase 1
  • BLC- Ctrl. Phase 2
  • BLC- Ctrl. Phase 3
  • motor speed with optical sensor
  • power input
  • command acknowledge from  BLDC-Controller
  • voltage supply

For the measure of the buoyancy force we use a weighing machine 🙂 (see gallery)

To measure the motor/prop. speed we used two different measuring methods.

1. Laser module  and a photodiode:

As you could see in the circuit diagram it is very high sophisticated 🙂

2. Via  Back EMF (back electromotive force)

Back EMF is the voltage that pushes against the current which induces it. This voltage can be used to measure the motor speed.

Some Results for the electric current versus buoyancy measurements:

auftrieb-zu-leistung-hacker-a20-22l

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Some Results for the Tau63 measurements:

sprungantwort-50g-hacker-a20-22l

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Last but not least, Ladies and Gentleman let me introduce you the Test-Stand itself 🙂