RESEARCH ARTICLE
A Computational Study on the Aerodynamic Influence of a Propeller on an MAV by Unstructured Overset Grid Technique and Low Mach Number Preconditioning
S. Deng*, 1, B. W. van Oudheusden1, T. Xiao2, H. Bijl1
2 College of Aerospace Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, PR China
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 5
First Page: 11
Last Page: 21
Publisher Id: TOAEJ-5-11
DOI: 10.2174/1874146001205010011
Article History:
Received Date: 10/05/2012Revision Received Date: 18/07/2012
Acceptance Date: 18/07/2012
Electronic publication date: 01/11/2012
Collection year: 2012
© 2012 Deng et al.
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The influence of a propeller on the aerodynamic performance of an MAV is investigated using an unstructured overset grid technique. The flow regime of a fixed-wing MAV powered by a propeller contains both incompressible regions due to the low flight speed, as well as compressible flow areas near the propeller-tip region. In order to simulate all speed flow efficiently, a dual-time preconditioning method is employed in the present study. The methodology in this paper is verified as providing a reliable numerical simulation tool for all flow regimes, in the additional presence of moving boundaries, which is treated with an overset grid approach.
Keywords: All speed flow, preconditioning, micro air vehicle, moving boundary, Overset grid, propeller-wing interaction.