Peer Reviewed Journal via three different mandatory reviewing processes, since 2006, and, from September 2020, a fourth mandatory peer-editing has been added.
This paper presents the design and validation of a
measurement system for aerodynamic characteristics
of unmanned aerial vehicles. An aerodynamic balance
was designed in order to measure the lift, drag forces
and pitching moment for different airfoils. During the
design process, several aspects were analyzed in order
to produce an efficient design, for instance the range of
changes of the angle of attack with and a small
increment and the versatility of being adapted to
different type of airfoils, since it is a wire balance it was
aligned and calibrated as well. Wind tunnel tests of a
two dimensional NACA four digits family airfoil and four
different modifications of this airfoil were performed to
validate the aerodynamic measurement system. The
modification of this airfoil was made in order to create a
blowing outlet with the shape of a step on the suction
surface. Therefore, four different locations along the
cord line for this blowing outlet were analyzed. This
analysis involved the aerodynamic performance which
meant obtaining lift, drag and pitching moment
coefficients curves as a function of the angle of attack
experimentally for the situation where the engine of the
aerial vehicle is turned off, called the no blowing
condition, by means of wind tunnel tests. The
experiments were performed in a closed circuit wind
tunnel with an open test section. Finally, results of the
wind tunnel tests were compared with numerical results
obtained by means of computational fluid dynamics as
well as with other experimental references and found to
be in good agreement.
