Design, experiment and aerodynamic calculation of a flapping wing rotor micro aerial vehicle

In this paper, investigation was made into the design, experiment, and aerodynamic analysis of a novel flapping wing rotor applicable to micro aerial vehicles (MAV). Attention was firstly focused on the design of a simple, reliable and lightweight flapping rotor configuration and wing structure to meet the challenging demands for high mechanical and power efficiency and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability of an MAV. The experimental work demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the innovative design. The paper presents an approach of experiment and processing the measured flapping wing total dynamic forces to extract the unsteady aerodynamic force. A potential-flow-based method, unsteady panel method was used to calculate the lift created by flapping wing system. As the method is two dimensional, strip theory is adopted to evaluate the aerodynamics of three dimensional flapping wings. Compared with measured data, the numerical results show good agreement with the first order lift component, which is caused by the rigid wing.