Because of their potential for application in both civil and military sectors as well as the challenge in designing a tiny flying vehicle, micro aerial vehicles have attracted enormous attention. Several configurations of micro aerial vehicles are under development, namely fixed wing, rotary wing, and flapping wing. Under rotary-wing micro aerial vehicles, coaxial contrarotating configurations with a stabilizer bar seem to provide excellent stability behavior in pitch and roll degrees of freedom. This paper presents the results of an experimental study performed on a coaxial-contrarotor helicopter model to evaluate the performance of the rotor system using different rotor blades. The thrust and power of the rotors in independent and coaxial configurations were observed. The percentage thrust loss in the coaxial configuration was seen to be dependent on the ratio of the upper- and lower-rotor revolutions per minute as well as the spacing between the rotors. A theoretical analysis using a nonuniform inflow model was developed, which corroborated very well with the experimental data. Using low-Reynolds-number drag coefficients for the airfoil, the estimated power consumption of the rotors was found to match very well with the experimental data. A closed-form solution using a uniform inflow model to estimate the thrust performance of a coaxial rotor is proposed, which also matches with the experimental observations.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Experimental Performance Evaluation of Coaxial Rotors for a Micro Aerial Vehicle


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Journal of Aircraft ; 50 , 5 ; 1465-1480


    Publication date :

    2013-07-31


    Size :

    16 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English





    Micro coaxial double-propeller unmanned aerial vehicle

    WANG WEITAO / XIE YIXING / WANG RUIHUA et al. | European Patent Office | 2021

    Free access


    Design Methodology for Heavy-Lift Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Coaxial Rotors

    Ong, Wayne / Srigrarom, Spot / Hesse, Henrik | AIAA | 2019