Design of a commercial hybrid VTOL UAV system

Abstract

For the last 40 years high - capacity Unmanned Air Vehicles have been use mostly for military services such as tracking, surveillance, engagement with active weapon or in the simplest term for data acquisition purpose. Unmanned Air Vehicles are also demanded commercially because of their advantages in comparison to manned vehicles such as their low manufacturing and operating cost, configuration flexibility depending on customer request, not risking pilot in the difficult missions. Nevertheless, they have still open issues such as integration to the manned flight air space, reliability and airworthiness. Although Civil Unmanned Air Vehicles comprise 3% of the UAV market, it is estimated that they will reach 10% level within the next 5 years. UAV systems with their useful equipment (camera, hyper spectral imager, air data sensors and with similar equipment) have been in use more and more for civil applications: Tracking and monitoring in the event of agriculture / forest / marine pollution / waste / emergency and disaster situations; Mapping for land registry and cadastre; Wildlife and ecologic monitoring; Traffic Monitoring and; Geology and mine researches. They can bring minimal risk and cost advantage to many civil applications, in which it was risky and costly to use manned air vehicles before. When the cost of Unmanned Air Vehicles designed and produced for military service is taken into account, civil market demands lower cost and original products which are suitable for civil applications. Most of civil applications which are mentioned above require UAVs that are able to take off and land on limited runway, and moreover move quickly in the operation region for mobile applications but hover for immobile measurement and tracking when necessary. This points to a hybrid unmanned vehicle concept optimally, namely the Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) UAVs. At the same time, this system requires an efficient cost solution for applicability / convertibility for different civil applications. It means an Air Vehicle having easily portability of payload depending on application concept and programmability of operation (hover and cruise flight time) specific to the application. The main topic of this project is designing, producing and testing the TURAC VTOL UAV that have the following features : Vertical takeoff and landing, and hovering like helicopter ; High cruise speed and fixed-wing ; Multi-functional and designed for civil purpose ; The project involves two different variants ; The TURAC A variant is a fully electrical platform which includes 2 tilt electric motors in the front, and a fixed electric motor and ducted fan in the rear ; The TURAC B variant uses fuel cells.