Abstract
The increase in the number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs), which are used in a variety of applications has led to a surge in low Reynolds number aerodynamics research. Flow around fixedwing MAVs has an unusual behavior due to its low aspect ratio and operates at low Reynolds number, which demanded to upgrade the used wind tunnel for this study. This upgrade enables measuring the small aerodynamics forces and moment of fixed-wing MAVs. The wind tunnel used in this work is upgraded with a state of art data acquisition system to deal with the different sensors signals in the wind tunnel. For accurate measurements, the sting balance, angle sensor, and airspeed sensor are calibrated. For validation purposes, an experiment is made on a low aspect ratio flat plate wing at low Reynolds number, and the measured data are corrected and compared with published results. The procedure presented in this paper for the first time gave a detailed and complete guide for upgrading and calibrating old wind tunnel, all the required corrections to correct the measured data was presented, the turbulence level correction new technique presented in this paper could be used to estimate the flow turbulence effect on the measured data and correct the measured data against published data.
Highlights
Several computational and experimental have attempted to compute Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs)’s aerodynamic forces and moments (Hassanalian & Abdelkefi, 2017; Hassanalian, Khaki, & Khosrawi, 2015)
This paper describes the upgrading and calibration of an educational wind tunnel for a fixed-wing MAV aerodynamic loads measurements
Smaller wind tunnels can be used for fixed-wing Micro air vehicles (MAVs) with low aspect ratios that are operating in low Reynolds numbers
Summary
Several computational and experimental have attempted to compute MAV’s aerodynamic forces and moments (Hassanalian & Abdelkefi, 2017; Hassanalian, Khaki, & Khosrawi, 2015). Torres and Mueller (2000) presented a detailed design procedure for MAVs based on wind tunnel data. A simple calibration was presented, and the sting balance was evaluated with designed experimental setups and evaluation procedures. This paper describes the upgrading and calibration of an educational wind tunnel for a fixed-wing MAV aerodynamic loads measurements. The literature review indicates the importance of wind tunnel testing for aerodynamic analysis of the fixed-wing MAVs. in this study, the applied wind tunnel for aerodynamic analysis was upgraded with a state of art data acquisition system to deal with the different sensors signals. The wind tunnel used in this study has as a sting balance (the sensor used to measure forces and moments for models in wind tunnel); it needs to be calibrated. The work presented in this paper was used to experimentally investigate the aerodynamics performance of the BlueBird MAV (Aboelezz et al, 2019)
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