Design and Determination of Aerodynamic Coefficients of a Tail-Sitter Aircraft by Means of CFD Numerical Simulation

Abstract

Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft have become important aerial vehicles for various sectors, such as security, health, and commercial sectors. These vehicles are capable of operating in different flight modes, allowing for the covering of most flight requirements in most environments. A tail-sitter aircraft is a type of VTOL vehicle that has the ability to take off and land vertically on it elevators (its tail) or on some rigid support element that extends behind the trailing edge. Most of the tail-sitter aircraft are designed with a fixed-wing adaptation rather than having their own design. The design of the tail-sitter carried out in this work had the particularity of not being an adaptation of a quad-rotor system in a commercial swept-wing aircraft, but, rather, was made from its own geometry in a twin-rotor configuration. The design was performed using ANSYS SpaceClaim CAD software, and a numerical analysis of the performance was carried out in ANSYS Fluent CFD software. The numerical results were satisfactorily validated with empirical correlations for the calculation of the polar curve, and the performance of the proposed tail-sitter was satisfactory compared to those found in the literature. The results of velocity and pressure contours were obtained for various angles of attack. The force and moment coefficients obtained showed trends similar to those reported in the literature.

Keywords

• flight dynamics identification
• autonomous vehicles
• model reduction
• dynamic emulation
• CFD simulation