Acceptable BLDC motor vibration threshold in PX4 flight logs – Long-duration industrial flight perspective

Flight Testing & Log Analysis
1

Hi everyone, I work on R&D of brushless propulsion systems for industrial multirotor mapping & inspection platforms.

We’ve been analyzing hundreds of PX4 flight logs from field test fleets, and noticed inconsistent vibration triggers across different outrunner motor designs. Our main confusion points:

  1. What vibration magnitude (from IMU logs) do you treat as the warning threshold for permanent motor mechanical wear? We see heavy drift after 80+ flight hours on low-sealing motors used in agri/dust environments.

  2. Does uneven stator winding balance directly amplify EKF oscillation during low-speed survey lines? We compared two motor batches with different winding tolerance, log noise gap is obvious but we lack community benchmark data.

  3. Motor thermal expansion gap: When motors hit 100℃+ continuous hover, rotor concentricity shifts, which worsens vibration. Are there any PX4 parameter tweaks to compensate vibration from thermal deformation?

  4. Vibration filtering trade-off: Heavy IMU filtering smooths logs but degrades low-speed attitude response for precision mapping.

Most online guides only cover prop balance, rarely discuss inherent motor manufacturing tolerance impact on PX4 flight stability. I’d love to hear your log analysis experience or standard vibration inspection workflows for commercial UAV motors

Thanks for sharing any test logs or practical tuning tips!