Originally Posted by
60FltMech
With upturned exhaust on H-60 rotor blades need to be positioned on centerline to avoid “charring” during rotor brake starts. I suppose even slowly rotating the pusher prop would help, but seems to be a recipe for disaster for personnel operating around the aircraft.
I’ve heard that the pusher on Raider X is electric driven, I assume clutching of the drive system would still be required?
I used to be pretty solid in the co-axial camp but the more I hear about the challenges associated with maturing the technology the less suitable it appears.
Would be interesting to see the engineering challenges both designs face discussed in detail by some of the members that have engineering backgrounds, think I’ll start a new thread on that in a bit.
FltMech
They would not necessarily need a clutch. They could drive, with a variable speed motor, the prop pretty much any speed they want down to very low rpm. The lower the rpm they want, the heavier the motor, unless they added a gearbox and clutch to the motor. An electric generator is also required with the electric motor, so this is very energy inefficient (perhaps 70%) compared to a mechanical drive (98-99%), and heavy. Additional cooling would be required the handle the energy losses of the electric motor and generator.