Design and Analysis of a Light Cargo UAV Prototype

Abstract

†‡ * A light cargo unmanned air vehicle (UAV) was designed, constructed, and tested in flight. This UAV was designed and build according to the specifications of the Air Cargo Challenge 2009 Design, Build & Fly European student competition. The basic aerodynamic and stability analysis that was used in the preliminary phase of the light UAV design are presented. Flight stability analysis was based on the linearized theory. The preliminary aerodynamic analysis was based on Navier-Stokes solutions for wing and wing-body configurations. The conceptual design was constructed and successfully tested. Further aerodynamic analysis for the full configuration was carried out to evaluate the performance during the flight envelope. The findings of this analysis could be utilized to further improve the aerodynamics of the existing design, and enhance stability and performance characteristics of the light cargo UAV. I. Introduction The technology of large and small unmanned air vehicles (UAV’s) is rapidly emerging in the European countries and the US. Te design principles for UAV’s are similar to the principles developed over the years and used successfully for the design of commercial and general purpose aircraft. The size of UAV varies according to the purpose of their utility. In many cases the design and constructions of UAV’s faces new challenges and, as a result of these new requirements, several recent works 1-10 are concerned with the design of innovative UAV’s. Initial thrust for improved UAV designs was given due to their importance in military operations. However, nowadays there is increased interest for UAV applications in the public sector for a vast area of applications 11-13 ranging from rescue operations to surveillance and monitoring. The first UAV designs that appeared in the early nineties were based on the general design principles for full aircraft and findings of experimental inverstigations. 14 Often the main limitation of commercial general purpose UAV’s is low cost. An important area of UAV technology is the design of autonomous navigation systems, however, this subject is outside the scope of this work. The tremendous increase of computing power in the last two decades and developments of general purpose reliable CFD software packages made possible the use of full configuration CFD techniques for the design, evaluation, and optimization of modern UAV. Several recent works