Design of a Long­Range Wing for the UAS30 Platform

• Autor(a) principal: Espíndola, Francisco Nuno Maurício
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/11683
• topic: Alcance; Baixo Número de Reynolds; Desenvolvimento de Asas; Desenvolvimento de Perfis Alares; Vant; Xflr5; Xfoil; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Aeronáutica

With applications ranging from aerial photography to agriculture fields monitoring, and passing through goods transportation, allowing operation and maintenance costs to be kept lower than those of manned aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been a technology with increasing interest from military forces, private companies or even individuals. One of the challenges in the development of this type of platform is the ability to operate with good performance for different types of mission. In this way, CEiiA developed the UAS30 platform, which has the ability to be equipped with different wings according to the requirements of the mission to be accomplished, in order to expand the ability to operate with good performances for various types of mission. In this dissertation, a wing that aims to give UAS30 good performances, especially with regard to range and higher speeds than those which this platform currently operates, was designed. The design process started with the determination of the possible chord and span ranges limited by the existing tail of the UAS30. The XFOIL/XFLR5 tools were used, firstly to create a new airfoil for the Low Reynolds number conditions of the UAS30 and, then, to perform performance and stability analyses, which allowed the determination of the remaining design parameters such as the MAC, wingspan, taper ratio, washout, sweep, dihedral and incidence, allowing to obtain a compromise between performance and flight qualities. The use of cruise flaps in order to increase wing performance for off­design conditions was also evaluated. In the final phase of the present work, the selection of an adequate propeller and an estimate of theoretical performance to verify the performance improvement brought about by the new wing design were performed. As a result, a wing was obtained that allows to reach a maximum speed much higher than that achieved with the original wings of the UAS30, allowing to fly with greater range and autonomy for the entire speed range. It was also concluded that, with the use of cruise flaps, not only stall speeds lower than those allowed by the original wing of the UAS30, but also maximum speeds higher than those achieved by the new wings without flaps, can also be achieved.