Simulation and validation of the aerodynamic performance of a quadcopter in hover condition using overset mesh

Preliminary Investigation of Wake Vortex Generated by Spinning Quadrotor Propellers Using Overset Mesh

“…The flow simulations use overset mesh that require overlapping of the Farfield mesh as the background zone and the Rotating mesh as the component zone, and the latter contains the propeller surface which is set as a non-slip wall. The Farfield and the Rotating meshes are created separately using the ANSYS Meshing module from the ANSYS Workbench with the domain sizes and lengths following that of [17] as shown in Figure 2(b). The boundary conditions of the Farfield mesh follow that of [12], where the upper and side surfaces of the Farfield are pressure inlets and the lower surface of the Farfield is a pressure outlet, and their settings are kept as default.…”

“…In Ref. [17], the flow simulations use different air properties as they validated their thrust prediction with experiments conducted in their locale with high elevation, and so in this study for the simulation of a single propeller in hover, the density and dynamic viscosity of the air is changed to 0.888 kg/m 3 and 1.8029e-05 kg/ms, respectively, to follow [17].…”

“…Apart from the varying turbulence model part in this study, all of the flow simulations use the k-ω Shear Stress Turbulence (SST) turbulence model with curvature correction, as it is one of the most commonly used turbulence model for simulating flow from a rotating propeller [11,12,17] and it is not as computationally expensive as Detached Eddy Scale (DES) or Large Eddy Scale (LES) simulation. In the solution methods setting of ANSYS Fluent, only the Coupled pressure-velocity coupling scheme that is compatible with the overset mesh.…”

“…There are also studies that investigate the effects of rotor-to-rotor interactions for multiple rotating propellers. It has been found that the thrust generated from the propellers fluctuates and decreases average-wise when the propellers are placed close to one another [13,14,15], and flow simulations in several studies using SolidWorks Flow Simulation [16], ANSYS Fluent with overset mesh [17], and NASA's OVERFLOW solver with structured overset grids [18] have been shown to be able to predict the reduction in thrust for multiple rotating propellers.…”

Dört Rotorlu İHA Pervanesinde Uçuş Hızı ve Dönme Hızının İtme Katsayısı Üzerine Etkilerinin Sayısal Araştırılması

“…On the other hand, quad rotor configuration outperformed due to higher induced drag. Cespedes and Lopez [11] simulated single and quad rotors with overset mesh and analyzed at different rotational speeds on ANSYS Fluent CFD analysis program. The overset and far-field meshes generated with Pointwise v18 for a single rotor and then scaled to quad rotors.…”