CFD study of a Micro Air Vehicle (MAV)

Lee, Yik Shern (2021) CFD study of a Micro Air Vehicle (MAV). Project Report. Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) are new type of aircraft maturing day by day and have reached unprecedented levels of growth recently. MAV is actually small kind of Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV), MAV also have enormous potential in applications, both military and civilian. There are three types of MAV, namely rotary wing, flapping wing and fixed wing. All of them exist nowadays and each of them contain specific capabilities and limitations. As MAV is small in size, MAV is hard to have a proper flight as they have to face the sensitivity issues due to the atmospheric perturbations. This study aims to model a suitable fixed wing MAV, using ANSYS CFD to simulate the lift coefficient, drag coefficient and lift to drag ratio to validate the simulation results with previous research and proceed it with parametric investigation. As considering the MAV is operating under an actual condition where cruise with wind disturbance, parametric investigation is carried out to determine the impact on lift coefficient and drag coefficient. The simulation results show that there would be impact on the lift coefficient and drag coefficient for several angle of attack, however, the lift to drag ratio is yet to be affected. In addition, this fixed wing MAV model would operate and had the best performance at 8° angle of attack as it obtained the maximum lift to drag ratio for both situations without and with the present of wind disturbance. Besides, the fluid dynamics behavior of flow around MAV at several angle of attack was observed and discussed accordingly. Even though MAV is small in size, it is found that vortex or vorticity flow also exist in MAV, especially at high degree angle of attack. Hence, the angle of attack is an important factor that should take into consideration for designing MAV.

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