Design and aerodynamic analysis of a VTOL tilt-wing UAV

Abstract

The aerodynamic design and analysis of an Unmanned Air Vehicle, capable of vertical take-off and landing by employing fixed four rotors on the tilt-wing and two rotors on the tilt-tail, will be presented in this study. Both main wing and the horizontal tail can be tilted 90°. During VTOL, transition and forward flight, aerodynamic and thrust forces have been employed. Different flight conditions, including the effects of angle of attack, side slip, wing tilt angle and control surfaces deflection angle changes, have been studied with CFD analysis. For a Tilt-Wing UAV, there are challenges like high non-linearity, vulnerability to disturbances during hover and transition, cross-coupling between three axes, very low time to double amplitude of the open-loop system. Therefore, the aerodynamic analysis has been done in detail considering especially the challenges in transition phase of the flight envelope.