Novel Planforms for Micro Aerial Vehicles MAVs

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Novel Planforms for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)

• Chad Hammons

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Funding

• Research Initiation Program (RIP) from MSU for
  Dr. Thompson
• Novel Wing Planforms for Uninhabited Air
  Vehicles (UAVs)
• Short term (1 year)
• Deliverable Proposal for Research

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Project Goals

• To identify multiple lifting surface wing
  planforms that exhibit the potential for enhanced
  MAV maneuverability
• To develop a better understanding of the
  vortex-dominated, low Reynolds number, three
  dimensional flows associated with MAVs.

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Project Stages

• Literature Survey
• Preliminary analysis
• Two wing planforms
• Determine procedures needed
• Choose a flow solver
• Analysis
• Multiple wing planforms
• AoA sweeps for each configuration
• LD, performance details, vortices interactions
• Vortices detection characterization
• Paper
• Additional parametric studies

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Literature Survey

• Mostly flapping wing studies
• A few papers on general characteristics of the
  flight envelope for MAV flight
• Consensus MAVs operate at Re of 104
• Two main papers on Novel Planforms
• Water tunnel test, 12 planforms Gatlin
  Neuhart
• Wind tunnel test, 21 planforms Gatlin McGrath

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Preliminary Progress

• Chosen two planforms as baseline
• 30o diamond and 40o diamond
• Identified additional promising planforms
• Generated geometry and mesh for baseline cases
  mostly
• Generated geometry for three additional cases

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Baseline Cases, 30deg
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Baseline Cases, 40deg
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Promising Case 1, 30degTwin
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Problems Generating Mesh

• PostGrid Error
• Error vmaxs(id)lt0., vmins(id)gt1.

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Next Step/More Problems

• Complete Mesh for 40 deg baseline
• Next step is to run Blacksmith to convert to
  Cobalt grid
• Problem Blacksmith wont read in the mesh
• Potential causes
• Changed Versions of VGrid/PostGrid
• ???

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Next Steps

• Convert VGRID to Cobalt to SolidMesh format for
  U2ncle flow solver
• Run baseline cases to identify best flow solver

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Longer Term

• Run solutions on all identified cases
• Run solution on new case
• Collaborate with Ming on Vortex detection
• Deliverable Proposal