Unmanned Aero Vehicle Design

Assessment: Report (3000 words)

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is ubiquitous and widely adopted for many applications such as spatial data acquisition, surveillance, rescue service and communication relay links, etc. Aerodynamics is an important consideration for the UAV design and has been identified as a key technique for the future UAV design. The motivation of this project is to design a low-speed UAV with high lift-to-drag ratio (??⁄?? ). Students are encouraged to take the initiative and
explore the possible designs (e.g. winglet) using XFLR5 as the project is intended to be open-ended.

Tasks:

Task 1: Aerodynamic analysis of thin airfoil
1) Select airfoil from the database below:
http://www.airfoiltools.com/search/index
2) Explore the aerodynamic characteristics of airfoil using XFLR5 (such as lift curve, lift-to-drag ratio, Reynolds number effects, etc).

Task 2: Low speed wing design
1) Design a wing with different shapes (e.g. rectangle, tapered and elliptic, etc) using the selected airfoil and explore how the shapes of the wing and aspect ratio impact the aerodynamic performance (e.g. lift-to-drag ratio).
2) Explore any design features such as winglet to improve the aerodynamic performance.

Task 3: UAV design
1) Design a low-speed UAV using the wing developed in Task 2. Students are encouraged to explore various aerodynamic configurations (e.g. conventional and flying wing configuration).
2) Carry out aerodynamic and flight static stability analysis for the UAV.

Submission:
S1: XFLR5 project files.
S2: Report presenting details of the analysis, conclusion and scope of the future work. Proper citation is required when necessary, and the word count DOES NOT include the references.
S3: Supplementary and add-on work is encouraged, and extra credit will be awarded.