Search Results

The performance and flight characteristics of an aircraft are markedly affected by the aerodynamic design, which can be done making use of various tools such as wind tunnel tests and computer simulations. Despite the fact that wind tunnel testing permits great trustworthiness of results, they are still slow and costly procedures. On the other hand, computational methods allow for faster and lower budget analysis. For the conception and the initial phase of an aircraft design, where it is necessary to evaluate a great variety of wings and lifting surfaces configurations, it is desirable to have a method able to determine the main aerodynamic characteristics, such as drag and lift, quickly. In more advanced phases of the design the interest is in obtaining results which shows a more detailed flow around the aircraft.

This paper presents the design process of an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) for general civil purposes. The aircraft was designed to serve as test platform for the autonomous flight controller developed by the SIDEVAAN project (System Development for Autonomous Aerial Vehicle) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Procedures used for aircraft conception and manufacturing are described. Aerodynamics, stability and control, performance and loads calculations are presented including particular design methods applied specifically to light aircrafts. Details concerning computational procedures used are included and constructive solutions during the manufacture process are presented.

Recently, the development of Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) has been an important activity in Brazilian Aerospace Research Centers and Universities. The major of these enforcements has been focused in the development of medium size UAV's for aerial reconnaissance. Particularly, the CEA-UFMG, start an effort in order to develop a small size UAV (SUAV) able to execute aerial reconnaissance of small areas. This work present the most important phases of the development process of this SUAV. For the construction of computational models for the flight dynamic simulation and the calculation of aerodynamics characteristics of aerial platform several in-house developed codes was used. With these computational tools became possible to design the guidance and automatic control strategies. Initially the strategies were developed for each motion in separated, and finally they are grouped for test ant tune in the 6DOF simulator. Details of embedded hardware and software are presented.

This paper presents the computer implementation process of the Panel Method for aerodynamic analysis of three dimensional bodies with or without lift. The computer implementation consists in the creation of pre and post processing environments and a solver for the solution of the problem in external flow potential over three dimensional bodies with and without lift. For cases in which there’s no lift, a constant distribution of sources over the body (fusaleges, farings, etc.) is used, their intensities calculated in order to guarantee impermeability of the body. For cases in which there is lift, a constant distribution of sources and doublets are used on the body (wings, tails, etc.). The intensity of the sources is solved in the same manner as cases with no lift. Intensity of doublets is solved in order to satisfy the equality condition regarding pressure on the under and upper side of the trailing edge (Kutta Condition) of the body without lift.

This paper describes the design of an International Formula One (IF1) racing airplane wing. The first step consists in the simulation of the airplane flying on the race track to obtain details about the condition in which the wing needs to be designed and optimized. The paper describes the details and formulation used to perform this simulation using parametric flight paths and a point model dynamic model. A scheme analytically obtains the control laws for the simulation with Frenet-Serret frames over the parametric flight path. Two different airplanes, with different power levels, are simulated on a typical IF1 race track to determine the range of lift coefficient in which the wing must be designed. Based on this lift coefficient range, a set of four new airfoils are designed based on the NLF0414-F airfoil. Their usage over the wing span is determined, using nonlinear lifting line method to assure that during races the wing operates inside the laminar drag bucket.