Computational Fluid Dynamic Analysis of the Flow Around a Propeller Blade of Multirotor Unmanned Aerodynamic Vehicle

Abstract

Multirotor Unmanned Aerodynamic Vehicles (MUAV) have been a high interest topic in the aerodynamic community for its many applications, such as, logistics, emergency rescue, agriculture data collection, and environmental sensing to name a few. MUAV propeller blades create a highly complex turbulent fluid flow around the body and the environment around it. The flow physics generated from the rotation of the propeller blades were studied in this paper along with the analysis of aerodynamic characteristics. A Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes (RANS) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of a propellor blade from a MUAV has been performed to quantify the aerodynamic effects. For this purpose, the verification and validation of the commercially available CFD solver COMSOL Multiphysics v5.5 was performed using the NACA 0012 airfoil which is one of the most highly studied of the NACA family. With this validation it created confidence on the results for simulating a MUAV propeller and evaluate the aerodynamic characteristics of thrust coefficient (KT), power coefficient (KP), and Efficiency (η). These characteristics were compared against experimental data and results showed to have a similar trend. This showed that the CFD solver is capable of solving the aerodynamic characteristics of any propeller blade geometry.