Aerodynamic Characteristics of a Free-Wing Tilt-Body Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

摘要

The free-wing tilt-body concept demonstrated excellent flight performance characteristics, including extremely short takeoff and landing and excellent gust load alleviation, through a prototype unmanned aerial vehicle flight test. Though some wind-tunnel tests were carried out to investigate the aerodynamic characteristics, there is still a need to further understand the intrinsic nature of its complex aerodynamic properties, which leads to possible design refinements and vehicle-performance-parameter optimization studies. In this paper, the aerodynamic characteristics of a generic free-wing tilt-body configuration were studied using a numerical aerodynamic analysis based on the panel method. The computed aerodynamic coefficients were compared with the previously reported wind-tunnel test results for verification and validation. The numerical aerodynamic analysis employed showed comparable results when compared with the experimental results, despite some discrepancies that are believed to be mostly due to known differences in the model geometries and the limitations of the panel method.