Author

Krishna Regmi

Date of Award

5-2013

Thesis Date

5-2013

Degree Type

Honors Thesis-Unrestricted

Degree Name

B.S.

Department

Computer Science

Degree Program

Computer Science

Director

Ting Wang

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is any flying vehicle which is not controlled by actual human pilots sitting in the cockpit but is installed with proper avionics that can either fly autonomously or by using the commands from its base. Some rotorcraft UAVs use a ducted propeller for two main reasons- safety and to increase the thrust produced by the propellers. While ducted rotors can increase the thrust produced, it also adds weight to the UAV. It was therefore hypothesized that by removing part of the duct materials (i.e. adding perforations in the duct) would benefit from both decreased duct weight and increased thrust. However, it is not clear how much trade-off would be between these two factors. Hence, the objective of this study is to explore the relationship between the change of thrust and addition of different numbers or sizes of perforations. Cases with and without duct, and duct with perforations were simulated using a commercial computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software Ansys/Fluent. The physics of the rotating propeller was modeled by a simplified disc with a pressure jump across an infinitesimal volume. Three different RPM speeds of the propellers were simulated by varying the strength of the pressure jump. The results show that the thrust decreases as the duct is added. As perforations are added, the result shows that with more perforations (i.e. more open area on the duct wall), the thrust increases accordingly until the thrust reaches a maximum value without the duct. The result is in contrast to a published experimental data stating that installation of duct can increase thrust. It is speculated that the current duct with a flat wall has caused such difference from the experimental data. Further study is recommended to continue more detailed computational simulation using a duct with cambered airfoil configuration to reduce the aerodynamic losses.

Rights

The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this honors thesis in whole or part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the honors thesis.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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