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ISSN Online: 2379-1748

ISBN Flash Drive: 978-1-56700-431-1

ISBN Online: 978-1-56700-430-4

First Thermal and Fluids Engineering Summer Conference
August, 9-12, 2015 , New York City, USA

NUMNUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF AIR FLOW PAST AN UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE WITH INTERNAL PROPULSION SYSTEM

Get access (open in a dialog) pages 397-405
DOI: 10.1615/TFESC1.cmd.012635

Abstract

According to the evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), several investments have been increasing every year, especially in the field of aerodynamic characteristics. This paper deals with the prediction of pressure and velocity fields on a UAV with internal propulsion system using computational fluid dynamics. The main objective is to evaluate the effect of the air flow past the aircraft and how this affects the aerodynamic performance by means of obtaining lift and drag forces. The airfoil of this aircraft is the 2415-3S, which was previously developed in [1]. For that purpose. An unstructured mesh was used since the computational domain is three-dimensional and complex. Both the computational domain and the numerical solution were made with commercial CAD and CFD software respectively. Air, incompressible and steady was analyzed. The numerical simulations used the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations based on the realizable k-ε model to solve the air pressure and velocity as followed in [2].
Results allowed obtaining pressure and velocity contours for several angles of attack. Certain geometrical modifications were made on the shape of the aircraft in order to optimize the aerodynamic performance. The selection of the configuration with the best aerodynamic performance was made. Finally, experimental results will be obtained in future work to be compared to numerical ones and achieve the validation.