The flight performance impact of three different landing gear configurations on a small, fixed-wing UAV is analyzed with a combination of RANS CFD calculations and an incremental flight performance algorithm. A standard fixed landing gear configuration is taken as a baseline, while the influence of retracting the landing gear or applying streamlined fairings is investigated. A retraction leads to a significant parasite drag reduction, while also fairings promise large savings. The increase in lift-to-drag ratio is reduced at high lift coefficients due to the influence of induced drag. All configurations are tested on three different design missions with an incremental flight performance algorithm. A trade-off study is performed using the retracted or faired landing gears weight increase as a variable. The analysis reveals only small mission performance gains as the aerodynamic improvements are negated by weight penalties. A new workflow for decision-making is presented that allows to estimate if a change in landing gear configuration is beneficial for a small UAV.


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    Title :

    On the Flight Performance Impact of Landing Gear Drag Reduction Methods for Unmanned Air Vehicles


    Contributors:
    F. Götten (author) / D.F. Finger (author) / M. Havermann (author) / C. Braun (author) / F. Gómez (author) / C. Bil (author)

    Publication date :

    2018



    Type of media :

    Miscellaneous


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    Unknown




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