Eli5: what are the benefits of a normal helicopter design vs a quadcopter we see on drones?
In: 210
Lots of good answers here, but I’m missing one of the main points: efficiency.
On one hand, rotor efficiency scales with disk loading (power per unit area of the rotor disk) because it’s much easier to accelerate a lot of air a little bit, than to accelerate a little air very much.
On the other hand is the control system. A quadcopter is controlled by varying the rotation speed of its rotors. Like in a car, constantly accelerating and decelerating is less efficient than cruising at constant speed. A normal helicopter does so by tilting the rotor disk and varying the blade pitch angle while keeping the rotor speed almost constant.
All in all, independent of the challenges of scaling a quadrotor system to something liquid-fuel based, a system with multiple smaller rotors is inherently much less efficient than one large rotor.
Source: MSc Aerospace Engineering
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