• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.17-22
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• 2014

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have been recently commercialized can largely be divided into fixed-wing aircraft and rotor aircraft by their styles and flight characteristics. Although the fixed-wing aircraft represents higher power efficiency, higher speed, longer flight distance and larger loading weight than the rotor aircraft, they have a disadvantage of requiring a space for take-off and landing. On the other hand, the rotor aircraft can implement vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and represents various flight modes (hovering, steep bank turns and low-speed flights). But they require both precision take-off control and attitude control. In this study, we used a quad-tilt rotor UAV to combine advantages in both the fixed-wing aircraft and the rotor aircraft. The quad-tilt rotor (QTR) system was designed and constructed by adding a tilt device with a servo motor to a general quad-rotor vehicle.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.197-209
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• 2018

In this study, numerical analyses on Quad Tilt Rotor(QTR) are carried out to investigate the interference effect of components and effect of operating condition during forward flight. Actuator Surface Method(ASM) which is implemented in an open source CFD code, OpenFOAM, is used to calculate the flow field around QTR with high computational efficiency. The lift of the front and rear wing is found to increase or decrease depending on the rotation direction of the rotor. At the rear wing, the interference effects of the front and rear rotor appear as a combined manner. Performance change due to the phase difference is found to be insignificant. For both rotors, the locally higher thrust is generated by the blockage effect of the wing. The interference effect of wake from the front nacelle contributes to higher local thrust for the rear rotor compared to the front rotor. And it is observed that the amplitude of thrust oscillation can decrease depending on the phase difference between the rotors. Aerodynamic performances of both rotors and the entire aircraft were compared and analyzed for various operating conditions.