Politecnico di Torino

Meccanica del volo dell'Elicottero

Relazione: "Design of a New Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cyclocopter"

Marco Licheri

Introduction

In this investigation, the research subject is the UAV cyclocopter, an unmanned aerial vehicle propelled by a cycloidal blade system, which can be described as a horizontal rotary-wing that offers good thrust levels and a superlative ability to change the direction of the thrust almost istantly by periodic pitch angle variations. This UAV vehicle can be used because of its advantages of low-speed forward flight, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and, in particular, for its excellent hovering characteristics. Figure 1 below shows a typical pitch motion of this type of rotary-wing: the blades at the top and bottom positions produce a upward force with a large angle of attack, while the blades at the left and right positions produce a small amount of force, because of a small angle of attack at these positions. In this paper, an UAV scaled cyclocopter was designed and developed by an optimization process, and, this way, analytical studies and flight expetiments were conducted to demonstrate that the cycloidal blade system can be a viable and efficient propulsion system.

Fig. 1 Blade pitch angle variation during a revolution

1. Analytical Model

1.1. Aerodynamic preliminary analysis In this paper, was investigated the installation of a cycloidal blade on a cyclocopter. At first, it was developed an analytical model to examine the characteristics and performance of the cycloidal blade system. This model is essentially based on momentum theory and on blade element theory. It is assumed that the cycloidal blade system can be rappresented by a pair of actuator disks in tandem. This numerical model uses a multiple-streamtube model divided into two parts: one for the upstream halfcycle of the rotor and the other one for the downstream part. Its also assumed that the flow through the rotor is one-dimensional, quasi-steady incompressible and inviscid. The cycloidal rotor is idealized as an innitesimally thin actuator cylinder over which a pressure difference exists between the inner and outer surfaces, and the actuator disk perpendicular to the generated thrust vector is capable of imparting axial momentum. In the aerodynamic model for the cycloidal system, the blade element and momentum theories were applied to the upstream and downstream halves of the cycloidal blade system. Its curious to see the typical induced inflow velocity distributions on the rotor, as shown in Figure 2.

Fig. 2 Typical inflow distribution on the rotor

As we can see, in the upstream part of the rotor, the flow passes into the disk in the normal direction (the inflow speed is zero at azimuth angle of 0 and 180, and the maximum inflow appears at = 90) and the flow distribution is symmetrical about the vertical axis. On the contrary, in the downstream part of the rotor, the total flow through the rotor flight path is composed of the component of the equilibrium-induced velocity w, and the induced velocity vd. In the same Figure 2, we can clearly see that the flow is tilted slightly with respect to the vertical axis even though, on the analytical model, the phase angle of eccentricity is set to be zero. This way, the symmetry of the flow through

the downstream rotor is lost, phenomenon seen also on computation analysis. Anyway, the magnitude of the induced flow velocity at the downstream rotor is smaller than of the upstream rotor. An other important assumption, on which the numerical theory is based, is that the inflow velocity and the incidence angle between the inflow and the chord line are constant along the chord of the blade.

1.2. Virtual camber effect The peculiar aerodynamic characteristic is that these blades are subjected to a curvilinear flow, with a behave very different from those used in a rectilinear flow. The local inflow velocity and angle of attack of the blades are unique everywhere on the chord, so the blades have different aerodynamics compared to that of the symmetric blades, even though the blades are symmetrical with each other. The local pitch angles depend on the ratio of the chord to radius and the flow curvature effects become more pronounced as this ration increases: the rotation of the rotor causes the blade to behave like a cambered airfoil, with cospicous variations in the lift coefficients. It was seen that the lift coefficient varied sinusoidally and the lift coefficient curve for the blade with camber effect is shifted by approximately 0.5 compared to that without camber effect. This explain why more lift force is generated in the downstream part than in the upstream part.

1.3 CFD Analysis The introduction of a CFD analysis, used to determine the aerodynamics design parameters of the cyclocopter rotor system, not only helps to predict the thrust level of the cyclocopter rotor, but also to understand the flow conditions around the rotor and the blades compared to the analytical and experimental methods.

1.4 CFD Model The CFD model is based on a cycloidal blade system test apparatus, a fisical device intended to verify VTOL capability and hovering performance. The conditions imposed on the boundary of the CFD model are the pressure, the no-slip wall and the symmetry plane boundary condition. The pressure boundary is located in the edges, except the downside edge of solution domain in order to describe an infinite space. No-slip wall boundaries were imposed on the downside edge of the solution domain and the blades surface to describe the ground and the surface of a blade. The symmetry plane boundary condition is imposed for the 2-D analysis. In the CFD model of the cycloidal blade system test apparatus, it was applied the k- low Reynolds turbolence model and structured and unstructured meshes were used, so that the motion of the blade in cycloidal rotor can be simulated by rotational motion of the meshes. Finally, to compare the experimental results with the analytic results, the CFD model was undertaken for three different velocities. The phase angle is always set to 0.

1.5 Results of CFD analysis It was shown that the induced airflow flows into the cycloidal blade system rotor in the normal direction through the semicircle, and then this induced airflow moves in a downstream direction. The curvature of the airflow of the cycloidal blade system rotor is induced by the airflow inside the rotor. In fact the inner airflow increases the resultant velocity of the right and down side blades at angles in the range 270 < < 360, while it decreases the resultant velocity of the left and down side blades for angles in the range 180 < < 270: as predicted in the numerical theory, this causes the total thrust vector to tilt and an asymmetry to occur downstream, which results in the development of the outflow curvature angle. This phenomenon can be seen in Figure 3. The comparation between the results obtained from the CFD analysis and the experimental results is in good agreement, despite the fact that the difference of thrust from the experimental results increases with respect to rotating speed.

Fig. 3 Airflow around the cycloidal blade rotor system

2. Experimental analysis

2.1 Experimental apparatus The performance of the cycloidal blade system was experimentally verified. The experimental apparatus used for this investigation was set up with the cycloidal blade system rotating about the horizontal axis. The key component of this apparatus is the rotating blades system, which generates thrust. The experimental test model is mainly composed of six rotor blades with NACA 0012 airfoil section, a transmission device, a sinusoidal low pitch system for varying the magnitude and direction of the thrust vector by the continuos variation of the pitch angle of the blades, set-ups in the rest apparatus to obtain high efficiency in hover, and measuring units for thrust and power.

2.2 Results of experimental analysis The first important result of the experiments is that the maximum pitch angle of the blades was found to significantly affect the rotor performance. The thrust forces are producted by cyclic variations of the blade pitch angles during the rotation. An increase in maximum pitch angle causes each blade to have higher angle of attack, causing the forces to increase and so inducing higher thrust. In conventional wings operating in air, stall would occur if the angle of attack approaches 30, causing the thrust to decrease beyond the stall angle of attack. However, this expected tendency to show decreasing thrust was not observed during the tests. When the blade exceeded the static stall angle and the effective angle of attack changes rapidly, dynamic stall can occur. And in the dynamic stall condition, the aerodynamic lift increases, instead of decrease! Thus, the high pitch angle can induce greater thrust. However, the drag increases dramatically because of dynamic stall and this gives a rapid increase of required power. The experiments showed that the cycloidal rotor can produce thrust in any direction perpendicular to the rotating axis. The rotor was also shown to have hovering capability, as well as forward flight capability. The measured data were also compared to the results obtained from the analytical approach. The numerical theory, used in the first approach to the problem, agreed well with the experimental results for thrust prediction. On the contrary, for power the correlation was good only for low amplitude pitch angles. Finally, the effects of the rotor radius, the number of blades, and the rotor tip speed were also examinated to see their contributions on the rotor performance. The hover efficiency of thrust per unit power increases as the radius of the rotor increases at a fixed tip speed. With respect to the influence of the number of blades on the rotor efficiency, the efficiency of the rotor with three blades was higher than with two or six blades.

3. Design of an Unmanned Cyclocopter

The final objective-step of this research investigation was the development of an UAV cyclocopter prototype capable of vertical take-off and landing to show that the cycloidal blade system could be a viable and efficient candidate for a VTOL unmanned aerial vehicle. The main goal of the model designed for this research is hovering flight, and the develop of this cyclocopter was just focused on this ability. The aircraft designed showed good results that agreed with analytical values and it was found that the cyclocopter blades system can be used as a powerful thrust system capable of achieving easy vector thrusting: this characteristic should enable forward flight in addition to hovering.