Multirotor Unmanned Aerodynamic Vehicles (MUAV) have been a high interest topic in the aerodynamic community for its many applications, such as, logistics, emergency rescue, agriculture data collection, and environmental sensing to name a few. MUAV’s propeller blades create a highly complex turbulent fluid flow around the body and the environment around it. The flow physics &nbsp;generated from the rotation of the propeller blades were studied in this paper along with the analysis of aerodynamic characteristics. A Reynolds Average Navier Stokes (RANS) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of a propellor blade from a MUAV has been performed to quantify the aerodynamic effects. For this purpose, the verification and validation of the commercially available CFD code COMSOL Multiphysics (COMSOL) was performed for the NACA 0012 airfoil which is one of the most highly studied of the NACA family. With experimental data available we compared it against the simulation results in order to determine the CFD solver as a sound method for the performing a numerical analysis on a propeller blade. We found that the experimental data matched well with the results obtained from the NACA 0012 airfoil, which were simulated under the flow conditions of a Reynolds Number (Re) of 6x106. With this validation we can be confident and be able to simulate a drone propeller and evaluate the aerodynamic characteristics of thrust coefficient (CT), power coefficient (CP), lift coefficient (CL), and drag coefficient (CD).

Computational Fluid Dynamic Analysis of the Flow Around a Propeller Blade of Multirotor Unmanned Aerodynamic Vehicle

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/FEDSM/FEDSM2021/volume/85284

ASME 2021 Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting (FEDSM2021)

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