Powered by a hybrid-electric system, where the combustion engine powers eight distributed electric engines, and keeps charged backup batteries.
Tandem wings have a wide gap within which the Center of Gravity can shift, enabling great flexibility for cargo load and distribution. In addition, tandem wings increase lifting, stability, control, and trim. Four wings are smaller than two and cause less structural stress, and complexity, allowing better payload arrangement with less structural strain.
Even though tilt-wings are less efficient for VTOL than rotorcraft architectures, in tilt wing architectures, the slipstream from the rotors goes through the wing, applying higher lifting power.
It is easier to transition from VTOL to leveled flight. As in rotorcrafts, tiltwings eliminate the need of airstrips, or ground launching/ catching equipment.
Tiltwings allow the use of bigger, slow tip speed propellers for reduced noise and better VTOL.
Even though tilt-wings with multi-engine distributed propulsion architectures are complex and relatively difficult to implement, we avoided more simple design approaches, like basic combos of electric engines for VTOL with a fuel engine for cruise flight.
These designs are easy to implement but lack of powerplant synergy, adding unnecessary weight to the aircraft (fuel engine when taking off and landing; and all electric engines used for those operations when in cruise flight.
The multiengine electric propulsion located along the wings, offers higher propulsion efficiency, and gliding performance, enabling a distributed air flow, reducing the effect of transversal winds.
Texo is configured with eight distributed smaller engines, with higher thrust-to-weight ratio, adding safety in redundancy, while reducing cost of acquisition, service, and replacement.
Our >50kg MTOW Texo variants are suited with hybrid-electric power system powering eight distributed electric engines along the wings. The batteries add power for VTOL, hovering, and in case of emergency landing, and power the payload.
The basic advantage of using this hybrid architecture is that, as the energy density of lithium-ion batteries is much lower than aviation fuel, the use of a small fuel engine to power a generator increases the flight range compared to an only-electric aircraft, at a lower weight.
The hybrid electric propulsion system is implemented with distributed, independent electric engines with tolerance failure (relative asymmetric redundancy), and lower noise flight segments (turning off the gas engine) during when missions require stealth.
Texo as an Open Aircraft Framework (OAf) is offered in three variants
