Wake Decay and Crosswind Interactions for Small Uncrewed Rotary Aircraft
Keywords
Propellor wake, uncrewed vehicle, wake decay, crosswind
Presenter Abstract
This research explores the temporal wake decay of a propeller for small uncrewed vehicles focusing on the rate it takes for the perturbed air to return to ambient conditions, the extent that the far field wake reaches to better quantify rotary wake dissipation rates, and the effects that a crosswind has on these spatial propellor induced flow qualities. These preliminary results are intended to better optimize in situ measurements for multi-vehicle campaigns such as swarm flight applications to better understand minimum required spacing to not have the wake influence onboard sensors and flight path planning for the minimum time between flights so that the vehicles do not collect data from lingering wakes that may be present. This will also assist in the next step of urban air mobility to optimize flight paths so that vehicles minimize adverse flight dynamics induced by other vehicles’ wakes as sUAV traffic density looks to increase. The experiments measured thrust on the propellor while observing the propellor induced turbulence to quantify the propellor wake, and using an open-air wind tunnel, a crosswind was generated to observe the effects on the wake. The research highlights inverse relationships between wake length and dissipation time versus crosswind velocity indicating that flight campaigns suffering from propellor induced error in their data may benefit from higher wind conditions during flight.
Presentations
Presented in Session 3: Platform Development III
Wake Decay and Crosswind Interactions for Small Uncrewed Rotary Aircraft
This research explores the temporal wake decay of a propeller for small uncrewed vehicles focusing on the rate it takes for the perturbed air to return to ambient conditions, the extent that the far field wake reaches to better quantify rotary wake dissipation rates, and the effects that a crosswind has on these spatial propellor induced flow qualities. These preliminary results are intended to better optimize in situ measurements for multi-vehicle campaigns such as swarm flight applications to better understand minimum required spacing to not have the wake influence onboard sensors and flight path planning for the minimum time between flights so that the vehicles do not collect data from lingering wakes that may be present. This will also assist in the next step of urban air mobility to optimize flight paths so that vehicles minimize adverse flight dynamics induced by other vehicles’ wakes as sUAV traffic density looks to increase. The experiments measured thrust on the propellor while observing the propellor induced turbulence to quantify the propellor wake, and using an open-air wind tunnel, a crosswind was generated to observe the effects on the wake. The research highlights inverse relationships between wake length and dissipation time versus crosswind velocity indicating that flight campaigns suffering from propellor induced error in their data may benefit from higher wind conditions during flight.