Configuration Design and Aerodynamic Performance Analysis of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

In this paper,a new configuration of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) was designed by conic lofting method and its aerodynamic performances were analyzed.The nodes of UAV geometry was generated and imported to Gambit software to build the grid file which was the foundation of aerodynamic computation.In terms of variant flight conditions,the suitable Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) methods were used to calculate the aerodynamic performances of UAV with Fluent software.The longitudinal aerodynamic performances of UAV with the speed of Mach 0.3,0.6 and 1.3 were computed.The results including lift coefficient,drag coefficient and pitching moment coefficient at different heights were achieved.As a results were analyzed,the calculated data could show the high lift-to-drag ratio and longitudinal stability.In result,the configuration of UAV could satisfy the flying quality with favorable aerodynamic performances.