ABOUT
The simulator, and the engineer who built it.
ThrustLab is an electric-UAV powertrain simulator. It couples the battery, ESC, motor, and propeller into one converged operating point, over a catalog of thousands of components or parts you build yourself, so the number you get is the number the whole system actually produces.
What ThrustLab is
ThrustLab is a physics-based simulator for electric UAV powertrains. It solves the battery, ESC, motor, and propeller together as one coupled system rather than chaining independent lookups, and checks its propeller model against measured data from the UIUC propeller wind-tunnel database.
For the people who design and fly electric aircraft, from hobby multirotors to commercial UAS.
WHY IT EXISTS
Real powertrains are coupled. Most quick tools aren't.
The usual quick-sizing tools treat a powertrain as a chain of independent steps: pick a battery voltage, look up a motor's Kv, read a propeller off a chart. A real powertrain doesn't work that way. The pack sags under load, which moves the motor's operating point, which loads the propeller, which changes the current draw, which sags the pack further. ThrustLab solves that whole loop at once, so a change anywhere propagates everywhere.
The propeller side runs blade-element-momentum theory over each prop's real blade geometry, and its predictions are checked, case by case, against measured runs from the UIUC propeller wind-tunnel database. The methodology and the predicted-vs-measured curves live on the platform page.
THE FOUNDER
Who builds ThrustLab
ThrustLab is built by Kyle Bedrich, an aerospace engineer focused on electric UAV propulsion. It grew out of a multi-fidelity simulation toolbox of propeller, motor, and battery models that he developed and validated against the UIUC propeller wind-tunnel database during his graduate work in aerospace engineering.
The aim is an engineering-grade tool that stays honest about its scope: every knob reachable, sensible defaults, physics you can follow, and validation you can see. Results are engineering estimates, so always bench-test before committing a real build.
ThrustLab is a product of Upwash LLC.