STUDY THE AERODYNAMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF QUADROTOR’S PROPELLER

Abstract

In this paper, we present research results on the aerodynamic characteristics of the Advance Precision Composite Slow Flyer 10x7 propeller (APC 10x7 SF) of a quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) at different angular and vertical velocities of the propeller. We simulated the aerodynamic characteristics of this propeller by using the Finite Volume Method combined with the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes method (RANS) and the k-epsilon turbulence model in the commercial software Ansys Fluent. The numerical results for the propeller show that, as the vertical velocity of the propeller increases, the thrust and power coefficients decrease according to the law of a linear function. In addition, in the case of hovering, we can ignore the aerodynamic effect of the fuselage on the propeller, which helps to reduce a lot of computational time without affecting the accuracy of the numerical solution. The results obtained from this study are the basis for simulating and selecting the configuration of quadrotor types in the conceptual design phase.