What is it about?
CFD models of isolated rotors are common, though the flow physics are still very complicated. To model a quad-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is that much harder. All four rotors must be modeled together, including their unsteady flow interactions. This paper shows the modeling of a quad-rotor UAV with the four rotors explicitly modeled and in motion using a unique application of the Lattice-Boltzmann Method (LBM) in the commercial CFD software package XFlow, now a Dassault Systemés Simulia product.
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Why is it important?
Many companies large and small can and have designed small UAVs, even going so far as to 3D print the parts, assemble the aircraft, and fly it in a back field without doing any simulation work at all. Working, flying aircraft can be designed in this way. FULLY OPTIMIZED aircraft cannot be. There is an established need for modeling of UAV aerodynamics to help optimize the designs, especially for payload and endurance. CFD has been used for many years for this purpose for both fixed-wing aircraft and rotorcraft but has rarely been applied to multi-rotor aircraft due to the complexity of the setup and the high computational demands. This paper shows it can now be practical to perform this kind of CFD simulation on multi-rotor aircraft for design optimization or other engineering purposes.
Perspectives
While not the very first of its kind, this paper is one of only a very, very few examples of fully unsteady CFD being performed on a multi-rotor aircraft. What is unique about the methods, tools, and process shown is that anyone can now do this kind of simulation. It is no longer to be restricted only to world-class technical experts with access to multimillion dollar government-sponsored supercomputers. Since many of the companies involved in the rapidly growing UAV market are small and have modest engineering, financial, and computational resources, the methods and tools shown in this paper represent the "democratization" of CFD for these aircraft to a much wider group of users than would be able to undertake such work using traditional CFD tools and approaches.
Mr. Scott E Thibault
XFlow CFD
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: CFD Simulation of a Quad-Rotor UAV with Rotors in Motion Explicitly Modeled Using an LBM Approach with Adaptive Refinement, January 2017, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/6.2017-0583.
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