aeronaut cam-carb light vs APC props

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Lecostarius
Posts: 46
Joined: Mon Oct 20, 2014 11:29 pm

aeronaut cam-carb light vs APC props

Post by Lecostarius »

I just purchased a set of the new "cam-carb-light" Aeronaut propellers (first time for me to use them). I had experimented with several manufacturers of propellers, and so far I am using APC propellers; in particular the APC are sturdy enough to withstand an occasional crash and very durable. Also, they are quite efficient - in particular the "Slow Fly" type - and there are many sizes to choose from. Now, I was curious how the aeronaut propellers would compare to my current APCs, and did some measurements and flight tests which I would like to share.

I measured the Aeronaut 9x5 versus my APC 9x4.8 SF (yes, not exactly same, I know...), and also measured a Aeronaut 12x5 against my stock APC. Measurements were done with both 2S and 3S battery layouts on newly charged Lipos with a MT2208 Tiger motor (a 180W rated device), using a 20A SimonK ESC, from zero to full throttle. A bit to my surprise, the Aeronauts turned out to give better efficiency in g/W in the low power region. More specifically, for the hovering thrust I need for my copter (around 200 g), the efficiency of the Aeronauts is roughly 5% better. For lower thrusts than that, the gain can be up to 10% - however I think this is mostly academic, since in practice you would not fly your copter with less than hovering throttle for obvious reasons :-).
For higher thrust, the gain is less, and at 3/4 to full throttle, I did not see any differences any more. So, in a nutshell, the Aeronauts would give me up to 5% longer flying time if I do not fly aggressively. If I do, I expect the same performance. Anyway, nice to get that, since the Aeronauts are also slightly lighter in weight than the APC (though it hardly matters for the 9'', its 8.7g versus 9.1g). I could confirm the same efficiency results for the larger 12'' Aeronaut propeller; and my measurement result is also in line with what the company says - that they optimized for the low thrust region. Obviously that optimization did not result in lower high-thrust performance, which is really cool.

Next was flying them; in direct comparison, I can say that the Aeronauts gave me a more stable flight experience, in particular when the copter is coming down from height and I need to give a lot of throttle to accelerate it upwards to prevent crashing it. There was less wobbling in that situation, probably since the Aeronauts seem more stiff than the APCs (from trying to bend both types, the APC appear a bit more sloppy). In other flight situations, the added stiffness did not give an advantage to me (at least not one that I was able to notice).

On the downside, I found the Aeronauts to be a bit noisier than the APC. I always loved how quiet my copter flies with the APCs. With the Aeronauts, they are louder. Dont get me wrong, they are not loud, but they are a bit louder than the APC. And for me, a silent copter is one of my major design targets.

The most important quality of a propeller in my opinion is durability - I do not want to experience in-flight breaks of the propeller, which is something that has been reported in other threads. In my limited experience so far, the Aeronauts worked fine with no problems. But, I never crashed my copter with the Aeronauts and never hit anything like a tree, so I cannot tell how they behave in this situations. My intuition says that the less flexible material of the Aeronauts (good for flying) could result in being more brittle (bad for crashing). But this is pure speculation. So here is my question to the community:

Is there anybody here who has more experience with the Aeronaut cam-carb-light propellers and can share experience with their mechanical stability and crash resistance?

Thanks for all comments.

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