AXI 2826/10

The following is a review of the AXI 2826/10 motor.
My thanks to Model Motors for the supply of this motor for review.

Initially some shots of this outrunner, most will recognise these from the AXI 2826/8 review, the AXI 2826/10 looks identical so I've reused the AXI 2826/8 shots for this review :

Introduction

The AXI 2826/10 is a relatively small outrunner and almost identical to the AXI2826/8. The differences between this motor and the 2826/8 are just around the voltage that it is designed to run at coupled with slightly different statistics with regard to its KV and power handling. Please see the table below for details.

As this motor is almost identical to the 2826/8 the performance can be expected to be very similar as well. However, this motor is designed to run on five cells rather than four. I am expecting power delivery to be the same but the overall amps required to extract the power should be lower. We also need to take into account that the pack used with this motor will be slightly heavier and therefore in-flight performance potentially may be lower than it is four cell cousin. It will be interesting to see how the two motors compare.

For the flight tests I have stuck to a routine including full pitch climb outs, loops, roles, bunts, inverted flight, flips, hovering and stall turns. I have not included tick tocs as this motor does not have the necessary power to pull off this maneuver well.

The data has been collected using a BNB products DPR 100 in flight data recorder.

The motor has been tested using NHP 515 Razor Pro blades and M.S. composite 515 mm carbon blades.

Motor Stats

A quick summary is as follows :

kv : 920
weight : 181g
Resistance Ohm : 0.042
Max current : 42A
Max efficency : 84%

Flight Performance (5S)

I selected a 12T pinion for use with this motor on a five cell pack.

My expectations of this motor were that it would perform to a very similar level to the AXI 2826/8. In this regard I was correct. I was quite hard pressed to tell the difference between the flight performance on this motor versus the 2826/8. However, this is not to say that there aren't differences.

Whilst the actual power delivered 741.56W peak is very similar to that achieved with the 2826/8 the amp draw required to hit that peak is much lower at 43.63A. The AXI 2826/8 required 54 amps to deliver the same performance. The RPM figures are also similar, with almost identical overall drops in head speed during the harder manoeuvres. If I had to pick which of these two motors was the best performer then I would choose the AXI 2826/10 because it has a lower amp draw and therefore will provide a longer lifetime to the lithium polymer pack used as a power source. In flight I also noticed that the AXI 2826/10 was slightly more confident when trying to do a tick tock but again this maneuver was not crisp and had to be performed quite softly in order to manage the motor power. Similarly to the AXI 2826/8 this motor runs quite hot and it also benefited greatly from the addition of the cooling fan supplied by Model Motors.

The pack used for this flight was a Hyperion Litestorm 5S 3700 from RobotBirds.

Blue is amps, green is volts and pink is rpm (*100)

As can be seen from the graph the peak amps during the flight was 43.63 amps. The average amp draw across this seven minute flight was 19.65 amps. The maximum power produced during this flight was 741.56 W. The maximum rotor RPM during the flight was 2056 RPM with an average RPM across the flight of 1555 RPM.

Cooling

As mentioned earlier AXI provided a new cooling fan for the AXI 2826/10 some further pictures can be seen below. This fan really helped motor temperatures.

Conclusion

As expected this motor produces a very similar performance to the very popular AXI 2826/8. With this in mind it would be hard to criticise this motor. However, in order to power this motor a larger five cell pack is required and I'm sure many people would expect a stronger performance due to the extra cell. Instead the AXI delivers a lower amp draw but the same performance overall. This motor is quite small and it is delivering the maximum power it can given its relatively diminutive size. Therefore given a choice I would prefer to run a cheaper pack and the AXI 2826/8 as this gives the same performance but at a cheaper cost. Additionally the whole machine should be lighter due to only having to carry four cells rather than five. This is not to say that I don't like the AXI 2826/10, I do, it just doesn't make sense to run this instead of its equivalent four cell stablemate.

Overall, this motor provides a reasonable performance at a reasonable price. Personally I would choose its four cell equivalent but this may be a question of personal preference.