In-Flight and Numerical Drag Prediction of a Small Electric Aerial Vehicle

This paper presents the procedure of drag prediction for EAV-1, based on a numerical analysis correlated to an in-flight test. EAV-1, developed by Korea Aerospace Research Institute, is a small-sized UAV to test a hydrogen-fuel cell power system. The long-endurance test flight of 4.5 hours provides numerous in-flight data. The thrust and drag of EAV-1 during the flight test are estimated based on the wind-tunnel test results for EAV-1's propeller performance. In addition, the CFD analysis using a commercial Navier-Stokes code is carried out for the full-scale EAV-1. The computational result suggests that the initial CFD analysis substantially under-predicts the in-flight drag in that the discrepancy is up to 27.6%. Therefore, additional investigation for more accurate drag prediction is performed; the effect of propeller slipstream is included in the CFD analysis through "fan disk" modelling. Also, the additional drag from airplane trim and load factor that actually exists during the flight test in a circular path is considered. These supplemental analyses for drag prediction turn out to be effective since the drag discrepancy reduces to 2.3%.

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