Abstract
This study is inspired by the flapping motion of natural flyers: insects. Many insects have two pairs of wings referred as tandem wings. Literature review indicates that the effects of tandem wing are influenced by parameters such as stagger (the stream-wise distance between the aerodynamic center of the front and the rear airfoil), angle-of-attack and flow velocity. As a first stage, this study focuses on the effects of stagger (St) on the aerodynamic performance of tandem wings. A recent numerical study of stagger on tandem airfoils in turbulent flow (Re = 6000000) concluded that a larger stagger resulted in a decrease in lift force, and an increase in drag force. However, for laminar flow (Re = 2000), increasing the stagger was not found to be detrimental for aerodynamic performance. Another work also revealed that the maximum lift coefficient for a tandem configuration decreased with increasing stagger. The focus of this study is to perform an experimental analysis of tandem two-dimensional (2D) NACA 0012 airfoils. The two airfoils are set at the same angle-of-attack of 0° to 15° with 5° interval and three variations of stagger: 1c, 1.5c and 2c. The experiments are conducted using an open-loop-subsonic wind tunnel at a Reynolds number of 170000. The effects of St on the aerodynamic forces (lift and drag) are analyzed
Highlights
MAVs operate in a low Reynolds number regime of 103-105 [1,2]
The tandem results for each stagger are compared with the sum of two single airfoils to assess the effects of wing interaction on lift and drag
The Effects of Stagger to Lift Force The wind-tunnel tests show that tandem airfoils with stagger 1.5c and 2c generate comparable lift to the single ones at 0° and 5° (Figure 5)
Summary
MAVs can be divided into fixed, rotary, and flapping wings. Examples of a fixed-, rotary- and flapping-wing MAV is Black Widow, Skybotix Coax, and DelFly Micro TU Delft respectively (Figure 1) [3]. Flapping wing MAVs are inspired by the configuration of insect wings that usually have one or two pairs of wings with the later referred as tandem wing. A tandem wing can generate a greater lift force than a single wing because of the wing interaction between wings. This research focuses on tandem configuration of fixed-wing MAVs due to its potentially better performance compared to one with single wing
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