Développement et Construction d'un Drone - Etude Aérodynamique et Système de Commandes

This work is the continuation of a longstanding project which aims at developping a fixed-wing unmanned air vehicule. This UAV has a high-mounted wing, a pushing propeller and its designated payload is a stereoscopic camera fixed on the front of the fuselage, surrounded by a fixed plexiglas globe.

Based on the four previous years of developpement, two colleagues and I have modified and developped the design further. This year, a real-scale wing was manufacturerd in order to conduct mechanical tests on it. Furthermore, a new, aerodynamic-efficient half-scale fuselage was developped to study the aerodynamics of the new design in the wind tunnel of the University of Liège.

This report is articulated about four main chapters. The first develops the changes applied to the \textbf{modified fuselage}, the constraints we faced in conceiving it and experimental data gathered from the wind tunnel. Second, an \textbf{aerodynamic study} is conducted on the whole half-scale model, that is including a wing and an empennage. Alas, due to a technical problem with a 6-axes sensor of the wind tunnel, no equilibrium study has been conducted; only 3-axes mesures were available. Third, an in-depth study is conducted on the \textbf{propulsive system}. The motor was also tested in the wind tunnel in order to obtain the quadratic thrust curve, and hence the performances at take off and in flight. A design change to a twin-engine configuration is also introduced. Last, the \textbf{flight control surfaces} are sized following given flight constraints, and the servomotors acting on those surfaces are selected based on the couple computed at the hinge of the mobile surface.

As such, this work tries to address some hurdles raised in the previous reports, particularly on the aerodynamic and performance side.