Thermal Management of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Power Systems Using Ducted Forced Convection and Computational Fluid Dynamic Validation

Abstract

The increasing power density of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has intensified the need for the efficient thermal management of their propulsion and electronic subsystems. This paper presents a systematic multi-fidelity methodology for the design and validation of a ducted forced convection cooling system for a Class-I mini-UAV. The approach combines analytical sizing and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analyses. In the preliminary design phase, a surrogate-based optimization (SBO) framework was implemented to determine the optimal geometric characteristics of a NACA-type inlet duct, enabling the efficient exploration of the design space using a limited number of CFD simulations. SBO employed a Kriging surrogate model trained on a Design of Experiments (DoE) dataset to capture nonlinear interactions between duct geometry and performance metrics such as pressure recovery, total-pressure loss, and outlet flow uniformity. The optimized configuration was then refined and validated through detailed external and internal CFD studies under representative flight conditions. The optimized NACA duct configuration achieved an average increase of 10.5% in volume flow rate (VFR) and a 9.5% reduction in velocity distortion while maintaining a drag penalty below 1% compared to the benchmark Frick’s NACA duct. The presented methodology demonstrates that the early integration of surrogate-based optimization in UAV inlet design can significantly improve aerodynamic and thermal performance.