Development of target drone UAV for figure of eight missions with autonomous system

Abstract

In 2020, the Indonesian government introduced three Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) development projects into the National Strategic Project (NSP), replacing the R80 and N250 aircraft development. The entry of UAVs into (NSP) has made the UAV industry in Indonesia grow rapidly. One of the functions of UAVs in the military field is as a target drone. The target drone was used as a firing target by either soldiers or guided missiles. Therefore, the target drone must be designed to mimic the movement of the enemy. Target drones must have the ability to fly fast and also good maneuverability. This study aims to design the target drone and perform numerical simulations with variations in wing sweep angle to determine aerodynamic performance. The design of the target drone begins with determining the Design Requirement and Objective (DRO) with 3 kg MTOW, cruising speed of 44.4 m/s, 1.2 m wingspan, and a flight time of 10 minutes. After that, it was continued to determine the conceptual design, preliminary design, and detailed design. The research continued with numerical simulation using the Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) method to obtain the values of CL, CD, L/D, and CM with four variations of the sweep angle that is 0°, 10°, 25°, and 35°. The results show that increasing the sweep angle on the wing will delay the stall because the flow tends to flow along the spanwise outward of the wing at a high sweep angle. Sweep angle variations did not produce significant differences in the values of CD and L/D. Also, increasing the sweep angle will reduce the moment of pitch value, which makes it unstable but has good maneuverability. Increasing the sweep angle will increase the maximum velocity achieved by the target drone. The variation with a sweep angle of 35° is achieved a higher maximum velocity than other variations with the value of 91.208 m/s.