Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Aerodynamic performance analysis of a propeller projected for low-speed unmanned aerial vehicles
Submission Author:
Luís Gonçalves , BA
Co-Authors:
Luís Gonçalves, Luis Barreto, José de Medeiros
Presenter: Luís Gonçalves
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0637
Abstract
This paper presents a CFD analysis of the aerodynamic performance of propellers for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. It is worth noting that the majority of UAVs are powered by propellers, so the efficiency and effectiveness of their payloads and overall operating costs are closely linked to the performance of their propellers. Therefore, this paper seeks to describe a CFD analysis for predicting the thrust and torque of small propellers and perform experiments to determine the associated error. The technical details of a numerical simulation of a propeller using the overset mesh method on Ansys Fluent® Academic Student Release 23.1 are shown, assuming incompressible and turbulent flow conditions, constant angular velocity, and using the atmospheric conditions of Juazeiro−BA (Brazil). The procedure consists of creating the mesh for both the static and rotational domains and executing the simulation. Then, a pressure-based solution is conducted under a transient regime, and K−ω SST with curvature correction is implemented as the turbulence model based on previous works. Additionally, this study presents and discusses the experimental process implemented to validate the proposed CFD analysis. Upon comparison with the experimental results, the simulation shows a deviation of 12% in the produced thrust and an error of approximately 25% in the required torque.
Keywords
propeller, UAV, CFD
