Experimental Investigations on Aerodynamic Characteristics of the ZHIYUAN-1 Airship

Abstract

S TRATOSPHERE airships have an enormous potential as platforms for different purposes such as monitoring, transportation, telecommunication, and so on [1–5]. For the purpose of verifying some core technologies of stratosphere airship, the remote and autonomous control fuel-cell-powered ZHIYUAN-1 airship (see Fig. 1) was manufactured at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 2009. This airship serves both as a reference configuration for theoretical investigations and as a flying test platform for studies in aerodynamic, flight mechanics and control, aeroelasticity, structural design, and fuel cell propulsion systems. The aerodynamic characteristics of the airship are very important for the designs of control system and propulsion system. The conventional configuration layout of the airship consists of the hull, fins, and gondola. The studies of part aerodynamics and interfaces are very important for the aerodynamic configuration layout design of airship. Moreover, the availability and accuracy of aerodynamic calculation methods such as computational fluid dynamics and panel-boundary methods need verify for these airship configurations at low-speed and high Reynolds number conditions. For these reasons, the wind-tunnel tests of scale ZHIYUAN-1 airship were performed. The dimensions of the real and scale ZHIYUAN-1 airship as the experimental model in the wind-tunnel tests are shown in Table 1. This paper is organized as follows: The test facilities and windtunnel models are described in Sec. II. In Sec. III, experimental investigations on scale ZHIYUAN-1 airship are presented. In final section, we draw some conclusions on aerodynamic characteristics of general layout airship configurations.