Date of Award

Summer 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Aerospace Engineering

Committee Director

Drew Landman

Committee Member

Colin Britcher

Committee Member

Thomas Alberts

Abstract

During the 2022-2023 Academic year, the defense contractor, AeroVironment, tasked the Unmanned Aerial Systems Laboratory at Old Dominion University with designing an autonomous drone platform. A brief summary of the aerodynamic requirements included that the drone should cruise at a target cruise speed of 30m/s, the drone would operate up to an altitude of 1500m and be able to land within a 20m radius of a designated landing spot. The laboratory chose a flying wing model. Additionally, the aircraft would have an airbrake system integrated into the platform.

The aerodynamic requirements were configurated through the use of a ‘constraint diagram’. The airfoil was selected by conducting a literature search and constructing an airfoil performance matrix. The airframe was designed computationally using the software XFLR5, a Vortex Lattice Method solver for low Reynolds numbers. The airframe was then flight tested and validated using the autopilot logs to confirm the predicted aerodynamic performance.

The airbrake system was implemented post flight testing of the airframe and was designed using Stat-Ease 360 software, which is a compiled GUI interface used to generate designed experiments. A response surface was generated using airbrake models created in XFLR5. This response surface was then used to find a list of potential airbrake solutions. The most promising solutions were selected to be wind tunnel tested. After successful wind tunnel testing, another design of experiments was created to flight test the airbrake system. The airbrake system unfortunately was never able to be flight tested due to complications with a launcher system designed outside of the scope of this thesis. Alternatively, the methodology of how to flight test an airbrake system was documented and a trainer aircraft fitted with an airbrake system was flight tested with all data logged and analyzed postflight.

After validating the aerodynamic profile and airbrake system, the aerodynamic performance of the aircraft outperformed all predictions. Additionally, while the airbrake system itself was never flight tested, all computational and experimental data points toward encouraging results. If the launcher system is improved, a future flight test using the methodology created could confirm the performance of the airbrake system.

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DOI

10.25777/6zfq-aj11

ISBN

9798384456070

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