High-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) UAVs and high-altitude pseudo-satellites (HAPS) place quite a demand on manufacturers and suppliers with high performance requirements for these vehicles and their components.
At Volz Servos, we’re proud to having joined forces already in 2017, with BAE, parent company of Prismatic Ltd, which makes the 35-meter wingspan, solar-electric PHASA-35™. Nearly ten years ago, Prismatic was looking for specialized servo actuators that could work in the extreme cold of the upper atmosphere.
In an insideunmannedsystems.com story, our CEO Phillipp Volz said “The initial requirement was a servo system that could operate efficiently and reliably at low temperature, -70° C and below. In general, all our standard servos can be used in low temperature conditions down to -80° C. And for smaller servos, including the DA 15-N, we provide added firmware enabling a heating function for temperatures below -40° C.”
As HALE/HAPS aircraft like the PHASA have to be build extremely lightweight, we introduced carbon fiber plastic housings to reduce the weight of the PHASA-35 servos while maintaining the same level of reliability. As Phillipp Volz put it back then: “It’s a 30 percent carbon-filled material with a density of 1.38 g/cm3. Carbon fiber reinforcement lends the material a high level of rigidity and creep strength. And we have also reduced the weight of other components, in total reducing by 40 percent the weight of our DA 22 BLDC, from 140 g down to 85 g, and of our DA 26, now down from 270 g to 160 g, without any degradation of lifetime.”
Conor Crowe, mechanical design engineer at Prismatic, additionally emphasized high-class service and support: “Prismatic has worked with Volz over years on a number of projects, during which time the support received has always been to an exceptionally high standard.”
