UAV Flight Dynamics

In the interest of promoting the integration of hybrid-electric power train into the aviation industry, research is being conducted by North Carolina State University to establish the feasibility of electrified power train in a small scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). To accomplish this, it is first necessary to understand dynamics of the system to calculate the required power associated with each portions of the aircraft's mission. Though research that has been conducted in the past based power required on published governing equations. However, in the interest of understand the system at its most fundamental level, it was deemed prudent to derive the governing equations from Newton's second law. Using analytical dynamics, a rotating coordinate system was applied to the craft and a rotation matrix was applied to establish the interaction of the aircraft's external forces based on its Euler angles with respect to the inertial frame. The equations associated with the values and interactions of the aircraft's external forces were combined and manipulated to develop three governing parameters of maintaining flight during a typical UAV mission. These parameters are minimum airspeed, minimum power applied to the propeller, and the minimum roll angle required to accomplish a loitering maneuver with set radius about a target. The next step of this research will be development of an optimization algorithm to match power train components to apply the necessary conditions derived in this paper.