Purpose and Classification
D6-250 unmanned aerial system (UAS) serves as a target and decoy for training ground (sea) and air systems for detection, targeting, and firing on enemy aircraft or missile. The UAS can also be used for intelligence and determination of coordinates of ground and sea targets.
Advantages of the System
The main advantages of the D6-250 UAS are that it achieves the mission requirements for target practicing and decoy with a propulsion system of an internal combustion engine and a propeller. Additionally, it has an integrated autopilot that allows fully autonomous flight and mission execution. The D6-250 is safe to be used outside the firing range because it has an integrated parachute with autonomous emergency deploying.
Typical UAS for target practicing and decoy on the market with maximum speed above 200km/h use small jet engines with a thrust up to 200N. These engines have very low efficiency with typical fuel consumption about 60 liters per hour. As a result, it is very difficult to achieve flight endurance above 30 minutes. The short flight endurance makes mission execution and synchronization with ground staff and air crews difficult. The requirement for a big fuel tank greatly limits the payload capacity. Additionally, these jet engines are expensive, with very short time between overhauls (TBO) and have higher risk of fire. Therefore, jet engine UAS have considerably higher acquisition and operating costs. The operating and maintenance of the jet engines requires qualified personnel and intensive training.
To address these problems, the D6-250 UAS was developed with off-the-shelf gasoline (petrol) two-stroke internal combustion engine. A new highly efficient propeller was designed and manufactured from carbon composite materials to achieve the maximum speed of 250km/h in horizontal flight.
The D6-250 innovative propulsion system has very low fuel consumption. It achieves flight endurance of more than 2 hours with only 10 liters (8kg) of standard gasoline (petrol) fuel. For example, real flight data show that the horizontal speed of 220km/h can be maintained with 38% throttle setting and about 3 liter per hour fuel consumption. Because of the the small volume of the fuel tank and weight of the fuel, the D6-250 has payload capacity of 10kg or about quarter of its maximum takeoff weight of 40kg.