2025 Paris Air Show & IDS Denmark | Show report Stork Drives is a Nordic supplier of electric propulsion, actuation and sensing products, which attended the show to exhibit some of the newer solutions from the Swiss-headquartered maxon motor company suitable for use in UAVs. “One of the newest drone drive motors from maxon is a 32 mm electric motor, which can produce 1 kg of thrust when equipped with a propeller, while another new and larger one, measuring at 87 mm, produces 9 kg of thrust with the appropriate propeller mounted,” said Thomas Radtleff from Stork Drives. “Both are brushless DC motors, and both are constructed using a proprietary technique for the motor windings that enables them to consume very low current, which is key for helping UAV operators’ batteries last longer. “For the motors we supply, we can equip them with propellers we receive from a business partner, and we work with customers to specify propeller designs that work with each motor to produce the amount of thrust at speed or hover that each customer needs,” Radtleff added. Stork Drives additionally provides electric motors from maxon subsidiary Parvalux, and from Dunkermotoren in Germany. As well as electric motors, the Nordic company provides a range of different gearboxes from these suppliers, including systems with planetary, rightangle, spur and spindle gears, on top of supplying ESCs, linear actuators, encoders, resolvers and brakes. PEGASUS R&D GmbH exhibited its Drone Ice Protection System (D-IPS), developed to protect UAV rotor and propeller systems owing to their vulnerability to icing during flights in weather with cold temperatures and high humidity (including through fog or clouds). “The system works by first detecting the presence of ice, which can be inferred by changes in the drone’s performance, such as the current draw and thus the torque of individual motors,” said David Kozomara of PEGASUS R&D. “Naturally, we can also measure local temperatures and humidity to first flag whether icing conditions are present around the UAV, and perform statistical analyses of a given UAV’s performance to prevent false positives.” The company also has a novel Drone Ice Detection Sensor (D-IDS), being codeveloped with other companies, which functions capacitively and can integrate into the structures of the propellers themselves, communicating wirelessly to a receiver module on the UAV. Once detected, the de-icing system can be triggered. This uses a biodegradable de-icing fluid, running in lines from a central tank and pump module to small sprayers on the drone arms, which dispense droplets of the fluid onto the rotor and propeller blades at a rate of a few seconds per minute. “Those impinge on the propeller surfaces, creating a thin film solution of the fluid and the melted ice, typically removing the ice within a matter of seconds,” Kozomara added. “However, given that in-flight icing conditions don’t just appear and disappear, ice can reappear not long after it and the de-icing fluid have been shaken off the blades. So, the system is designed to keep monitoring for hampered rotor performance, and then keep spraying every minute for a few seconds, continually removing ice until the mission ends or fluid runs out.” 67 Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2025 The R2 Wireless solution detects, classifies, geolocates and tracks incoming RF signals in real time using proprietary signal processing and edge AI algorithms Stork Drives sells numerous electric propulsion solutions, including maxon’s 87 mm diameter BLDC motors (as shown)
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