FLOW AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF A QUADCOPTER UAV

Propellers are responsible for the altitude and attitude motions of a Quadcopter type of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). A propeller generates the thrust in the axial direction of the propeller's rotation. In the present study, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis has been performed on a Quadcopter and its propeller to calculate the thrust generated by the propeller under the applied rotational speed. The solid CAD models of a Quadcopter and propeller have been designed in Catia v5. The created propeller design has been imported to ANSYS workbench fluid flow (fluent) module. Simulation has been conducted by using the k-epsilon turbulence model. Furthermore, the obtained results have been imported from fluent flow module to transient structural module in order to find out the deformation and stress induced in the propeller, due to the pressure generated by the rotation of propeller at 6500 RPM. From the obtained results, it can be seen that the designed propeller can generate the required amount of thrust force to lift the Quadcopter and can sustain the dynamic loading without failure.