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f military planners had their
way, infantry platoons would
be equipped with small, dis-
posable aircraft that could
scout ahead, detect chemical and
biological agents, and even tag
buildings and vehicles as targets
for smart bombs. The planners
complain that current Unmanned
Air Vehicles (UAVs) are so large
they need a truck to cart them
around, complicated enough to
need a specialized crew to launch
and operate, and so expensive
they cant be discarded on the
battlefield. And in the end, infor-
mation gathered by UAVs rarely,
if ever, travels down the chain of A see-through engineering mock-up of the next-generation
command fast enough to platoon Black Widow, a micro air vehicle from AeroVironment, shows its
level where it could save lives. hardware. The real thing will have a solid Styrofoam structure
To give companies and re- with balsa-wood reinforcement.
search institutes incentive to de-
velop handheld reconnaissance vehicles, the neers at Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
Defense Advanced Research Projects ogys Lincoln Labs, a 6-in.-long, propeller-
Agency (Darpa) is funding research on mi- driven aircraft with a lift-to-drag ratio of
cro air vehicles (MAVs), one-time-use air- about 5 needs 2.5 W of shaft power for cruis-
craft that measure less than 6 in. in any di- ing; double that for climbing and maneuver-
mension, weigh less than 4 oz., and cost less ing. This makes the majority of standard
than $1,000. Darpa envisions them as being model-airplane engines too big for the job. The MAV from Intelligent Automation
able to carry out real-time imaging, naviga- Still, internal combustion engines seem the Inc., has a fuselage made of
tion, and communication and have a range of most likely candidates. vacuum-formed polycarbonate and
6 miles, a top speed of 30 mph, and fly for at One design team using an internal com- wings made of biased directional S-
least 20 min. Some military planners also bustion engine is at Intelligent Automation glass and epoxy skin. For structural
want MAVs to be ready for urban assaults, Inc. (IAI) in Rockville, Md. Bill Harvey, and weight-saving purposes, the
with the ability to search building and disas- lead engineer, chose a 0.01-cu-in. recipro- wing skin varies from 0.025 in. at
ter sites or monitor hostage situations. cating engine, the Cox 010, to power its the root to 0.70 at the tip. The
MAV. The engine is the smallest, mass-pro- complete airframe weights about 18
GETTING AIRBORNE duced internal-combustion engine in the gm. It carries a 6-gm CMOS camera
One of the first challenges in MAV de- world and is built by Estes, the model rocket
sign is the power plant. According to engi- engine company, for aircraft hobbyists.
equipped with a panning mirror.
SCALING JET ENGINES DOWN, perature ceramic. Or silicon molds might first be built then coated
with the protective ceramic.
WAY DOWN Another problem is that lithography, which builds in layers, can
One of the most radical proposals for powering MAVs is to use gas only make planar or extruded parts. A turbine blade, for example,
turbines the size of shirt buttons 3-mm long with a 12-mm diame- cant be thinner at the root or make a twist. Researchers will have to
ter. The engines would be microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) live with this constraint unless new fabrication techniques can be de-
fabricated with the same techniques used to build computer chips. veloped. High-speed bearings with clearances in the submicron range
They would work like conventional jet engines, complete with min- will also have to be developed.
iature compressors, turbines, and combustion chambers. With the ad- M.I.T.s project focuses on the engine and will need further devel-
dition of a MEMS generator, each engine could provide about 16 W opment of fuel-control systems, electronic controls for the generator,
of electricity. (If thrust is the goal, the microengines can be designed an inlet air filter, and a fuel tank to be of practical use in an MAV. But
to put out approximately 0.125 N or 3 gm of thrust.) figures for the baseline engine (see Tech Specs) could later be im-
A research team headed by Alan Epstein at M.I.T.s Gas Turbine proved by adding heat recuperators and other improvements. Calcu-
Laboratory has already constructed a 4-mm turbine wheel in their lations show such an engine might have a 100-W output, fuel con-
quest for a MEMS turbine. Although there are some problems work- sumption in 2.8-gm/Whr range, and have a thrust-to-weight ratio of
ing at this scale, there are also some advantages. One major plus is 100:1. (The high thrust-to-weight ratio is the result of the cube-square
that as size shrinks, the likelihood a component has a material flaw law. As size diminishes in a jet engine, airflow, and thus the power,
decreases and they are proportionally stronger. This is helpful since decreases with the intake area, the square of the linear size. Mean-
the tiny turbines must spin at 2.4 million rpm, twice as fast as con- while, weight decreases with the volume, the cube of linear size. So
ventional turbines, to generate enough power. Stronger components with all else being the same, as the size of a jet engine goes down, the
are less likely to fracture under this stress. power-to-weight ratio increases.)
Reducing the size also shortens the startup and shutdown times to
few hundred microseconds. This will let designers use it in a pulsed
mode either all on, where it is most effi- Baseline parameters
cient, or all off. Pulsed operation also elim- ARRANGEMENT Single spool turbojet
inates the need to regulate fuel flow; if the SIZE 12 mm OD 3 3 mm long
engine is running, fuel always flows at
100%. PRESSURE RATIO 4:1
Most problems associated with the mi- AIRFLOW 0.15 gm/sec
cro turbines revolve around the manufac- COMBUSTOR TEMPERATURE 1,600K
turing process used, lithography. While it ROTOR SPEED 2.4 million rpm
does produce extremely accurate parts and
can be used for mass production, it is cur- OUTPUT 16 W of electrical power or
rently best suited to silicon. Unfortunately, 13 gm (0.125 N) of thrust
silicon cant withstand the high tempera- WEIGHT 1 gm
tures (1,300 to 1,700K) the turbines are Researchers at MITs Gas Turbine Lab built
FUEL Hydrogen
expected to create. One possible solution to this turbine wheel with a 4-mm diameter out
this problem is to develop lithography FUEL CONSUMPTION 7 gm/hr
of silicon as part of their project to build a
techniques for silicon carbide, a high-tem-
turbojet engine the size of a shirt button.
.
Reprinted with permission of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Mass
ments.
M-Dot Inc.s turbojet puts out 1.43 lb of Student-built MAVs like these
thrust and weighs 78 gm. One of the chal- competed last year at the
lenges in building it was maintaining the University of Floridas first
compressor, turbine, and combustor efficien- MAV Flyoff where they had to
cies with low flow rates and small air pas- fly 600 yd, peer inside a
sageways. box, then fly back to the
launch site with information
on what was inside the box.
Entries this year have to be
smaller, less expensive, and
there are major differences between the two will be given a more difficult
schemes. AeroVironments plane is radio task to perform.
controlled, with the ground-based pilot con-
trolling throttle, rudders and elevators. It is
relatively low speed (30 to 40 knots) and
might be best-suited for indoor missions.
And Keenon and his team are loading it with tures where RF signals cant penetrate. The for propulsion, either turbojets or internal
equipment that could provide more auton- machine vision might also be modified into combustion, and a relatively high percent-
omy than other MAVS. He and his team a collision-avoidance system. age of the energy will be lost as heat, espe-
have already developed and flown a 1-gm cially given the high surface-to-volume ratio
gyroscope that stabilizes the craft in flight. GETTING IT TO FIT of microengines. Engineers want to inte-
The next-generation Black Widow, accord- Another overall challenge in designing grate the thin-film generator into the walls
ing to Keenon, will feature a GPS receiver, MAVs is in cramming all the necessary of the engine, possibly building the engine
inertial stabilization and altitude pressure gear into a small space. Its forcing design- casing out of the thermoelectric device.
sensors, magnetic compass, airspeed sensor, ers to come up with some innovative solu- A handful of MAVs are flying, and sev-
and microwave command receiver and tions. IAI, for example, is using the flight eral more should be test flown by the end of
transmitter. control servos as wing spars. next year. There are some formidable chal-
IAIs plane transmits video only and is lim- Other space-saving techniques being dis- lenges to be met before they are ready for
ited to a 3-km range. This could be increased cussed are the etching of circuits on the walls the battlefield. For one thing, they need to be
by switching to spike discharge video, send- of structures rather than on separate circuit mass produced at a low cost and designed
ing an updated image every 10 sec, to boost boards, using any hollow spaces as fuel tanks, for use by soldiers and marines with little to
range and conserve electricity. The MAV and using steered antennas to cut down on the no flying experience. Its more likely that
transmits on a standard radio-control fre- size of transmitters and required power. some MAVs will be adapted to commercial
quency, making the onboard transmitter small Power density is critical, and engineers are use before they see military action.
enough to be carried, and receives servocon- looking for ways to wring the most out of
trol data at about 900 MHz, which makes the what they have. One company, Technology
receiving antenna small as well. in Blacksburg Inc., Blacksburg, Va., is devel- WE WANT YOUR FEEDBACK.
IAI put the flight-control processing in oping a lightweight thermoelectric generator Did you find this article interesting?
the ground station. It converts operator stick designed to get every last erg out of waste Circle 751
inputs to ruddervator signals. It also uses a heat. It is a semiconductor-based device that Do you want more information
form of machine vision, recognizing verti- converts heat directly into electricity. The fin- on this topic? Circle 752
cal and horizontal edges in incoming video, ished product should be a microthin film Comment via e-mail to
translating them into building walls or hori- (0.05 in. thick) with a 5% conversion effi- mdeditor@penton.com
zons. Then, updated at 15 Hz, the ground ciency, which could rise to as high as 20% What related topics would you like to see
station can automatically fly the MAV be- with quantum well technologies. covered? What additional information
tween buildings or through a tunnel. This The development hinges on the fact that on this topic would you find useful?
would let it fly through buildings or struc- MAVs might use some form of heat engine