Aerodynamic analysis for control and simulation of unmanned aerial vehicles

This research project is focused on the aerodynamic modeling of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and its application to determine the aircraft aerodynamic characteristics. The aerodynamic modeling procedure of the UAV is based on the vortex lattice method (VLM). The goal is the computation of the aerodynamic stability and control derivatives for composing the flight vehicle equations of motion. The vortex lattice method code that will be used is the Tornado VLM Toolkit, a MATLAB based freeware program developed at KTH- Sweden. The aerodynamic (stability) derivatives shall be validated by comparing the calculated derivatives with the corresponding aerodynamic derivatives identified from experimental flight data. The unmanned aerial vehicles that is used for this research is called Vector-P. During the flight several maneuvers have been done to retrieve good data. The maneuvers that were done are the doublet and the 3-2-1-1 maneuver. By doing four identifications and one validation the longitudinal aerodynamic derivatives of the Vector-P are determined. Next the results of the flight testing are compared with the result of Tornado. Unfortunately only one derivative is more or less the same with both methods. The difference in the aerodynamic coefficients will have a great influence on the fly performance of the Vector-P. In Matlab a manoeuvre was simulated with both coefficients. The two manoeuvres were very different from each other and the velocity in both cases was not a match either. The main reason is that the Cmα is calculated too high by Tornado.