Design and Fluid Flow Analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone and also referred to as an unpiloted aerial vehicle and a Remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), it is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard. The present work is carried out to obtain a concept design of the large UAV fuselage to yield the shape and material distribution for the determined loads and constraints within a design space. The UAV project is to develop a micro drone whose largest dimension is no more than 15 centimeters (6 inches), would carry a day-night image and have an endurance of about two hours. It will be very low cost. It is operated with a high degree of autonomy to be used in the squad-level combat environment. UAVs capable of hovering and vertical flight would be used to scout out buildings for urban combat and counter terrorist operations. Then only the fuselage is considered as a design space and meshed using tetrahedral elements and optimized to obtain distribution of material such that the structure has minimum compliance and it is constrained at the root chord in all degree of freedom. The results obtained can be used to derive an appropriate configuration. Using global material distribution a level is performed. This results in the structural concept design which satisfies all the design constraints using minimum material.