Abstract
Propellers/rotors are usually indispensable parts of unmanned air vehicles that enable them to hover, fly, and maneuver. It is therefore extremely important to understand and resolve various flow structures that are present during flight. Here, the flow around a hovering, small-scale, custom-made propeller is numerically investigated by wall-modeled large eddy simulation (WMLES). Different operating regimes, achieved by changing RPMs, were both measured and computed, and the two sets of results are compared. Additional flow visualizations in the form of instantaneous flow fields are presented. While the computed thrust and power curves follow the expected trends, slight discrepancy between the experimental and numerical values is observed. It can be attributed to differences in the two setups (i.e., some simplifications of the real geometry in the numerical experiment) as well as the complexity of flow transition processes (present at such small Reynolds number flows).
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Abbreviations
- P:
-
Power
- T:
-
Thrust
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Acknowledgment
J. S. conducted this research during a Fulbright Fellowship at Stanford University, Center for Turbulence Research from November 2021. J. S. is also supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia through contract no. 451-03-68/2022-14/200105.
The GPU-accelerated simulations in this paper were performed using “Chapman” at the Center for Turbulence Research.
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Svorcan, J., Ivey, C. (2023). WMLES of a Small-Scale Hovering Propeller. In: Karakoc, T.H., Le Clainche, S., Chen, X., Dalkiran, A., Ercan, A.H. (eds) New Technologies and Developments in Unmanned Systems. ISUDEF 2022. Sustainable Aviation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37160-8_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37160-8_39
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