• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.335-341
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• 2012

Purpose: While an unmanned helicopter has been extensively used for spraying chemicals on agricultural crops, its low utilization (two months per year from July to August) has recently become an issue. This study aimed to increase the utilization of the unmanned helicopter. The centrifugal rice seeder, a mounting device for rice seeding for unmanned helicopter was developed and assessed its performance. Methods: The concept of the centrifugal spraying device was to obtain design criteria for centrifugal distribution. Four types of blade shapes namely straight, curved, straight wing and curved wing were developed and used. The rotational speed of the blades was tested at 1,000, 1,200 and 1,400 rpm. Results: The blade shapes, rotational blade speed and angle of trajectory were theoretically analyzed and results were validated with a series of laboratory experiments. Conclusions: The curved wing blades provided the distribution uniformity (DU) at 1,200rpm of rotational speed and 60 degree of seed drop point. The spray uniformity of 4.2% was also achieved.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.298-304
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• 2014

The lifting-line method based on Weissinger's method is extended to be able to analyze the ground effect. The method is applied to predict the variation of aerodynamic performance due to ground effect for the elliptic wing with aspect ratio of 10 and the wing of human powered aircraft. While the vortex strength of the wing increases slightly, the downwash decreases significantly as the wing approaches to the ground. For the wing of human powered aircraft, the increment of lift at the height of 2m is 5% than the lift outside the influence of ground effect. The decrease of induced drag at the height of wing span is 10% and at the height of 2m is 55% than that out of ground effect.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.38-45
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• 2019

When there is a spray flow such as from a pesticide nozzle, winds affect the droplet flow of a rotary-wing drone accompanied by a strong wake, with a severe oscillation. Especially, during forwarding flights or when winds come from the side, compare to a simple hovering flight as the droplet is in the effect of aerodynamic drag force, the effect of spraying region becomes even larger. For this reason, the spraying of pesticides using drones may cause a greater risk of scattering or a difference in droplet dispersion between locations, resulting in a decrease in efficiency. Therefore, through proper numerical modeling and its applied simulation, an indication tool is required applicable for the various flight and atmospheric conditions. In this research, we completed both experiment and numerical analysis for the strong downwash from the rotor and flight velocity of the drone by comparing the probability density function of droplet distribution to build a spraying system that can improve the efficiency when spraying droplets in the pesticide spray drone.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.25-38
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• 2023

Due to the complexity and difficulty in meeting the multiphase flow complexity, similarity, and multiscale characteristics, the mechanism of snow drift is so complicated that the snow deposition prediction is still inaccurate and needs to be far improved. Meanwhile, the validation of prediction methods is also limited due to a lack of field-measured data about snow deposition. To this end, a field measurement activity about snow deposition around a cube with time was carried out, and the snow accumulation process was measured under blowing snow conditions in northwest China. The maximum snow depth, snow profile, and variation in snow depth around the cube were discussed and analyzed. The measured results indicated three stages of snow accumulation around the cube. First, snow is deposited in windward, lateral and leeward regions, and then the snow depth in windward and lateral regions increases. Secondly, when the snow in the windward region reaches its maximum, the downwash flow erodes the snow against the front wall. Meanwhile, snow range and depth in lateral regions have a significant increase. Thirdly, a narrow road in the leeward region is formed with the increase in snow range and depth, which results in higher wind speed and reforming snow deposition there. The field measurement study in this paper not only furthers understanding of the snow accumulation process instead of final deposition under complex conditions but also provides an important benchmark for validating prediction methods.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.368-375
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• 2018

In the present study, aerodynamic load analysis for a floating off-shore wind turbine was conducted to examine the effect of periodic platform motion in the direction of 6-DOF on rotor aerodynamic performance. Blade-element momentum method(BEM) was used for a numerical simulation, the unsteady airload effects due to the flow separation and the shed wake were considered by adopting a dynamic stall model based on the indicial response method. Rotor induced downwash was estimated using the momentum theory, coupled with empirical corrections for the turbulent wake states. The periodic platform motions including the translational motion in the heave, sway and surge directions and the rotational motion in the roll, pitch and yaw directions were considered, and each platform motion was applied as a sinusoidal function. For the numerical simulation, NREL 5MW reference wind turbine was used as the target wind turbine. The results showed that among the translation modes, the surge motion has the largest influence on changing the rotor airloads, while the effect of pitch motion is predominant for the rotations.

• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.54-63
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• 2022

Recently, electric propulsion aircraft with various propeller mounting positions have been under construction. The position of the propeller relative to the wing can significantly affect the aerodynamic performance of the aircraft. Placing the propeller in front of the wing produces a complex swirl flow behind or around the propeller. The up/downwash induced by the swirl flow can alter the wing's local effective angle of attack, causing a change in the aerodynamic load distribution across the wing's spanwise direction. This study investigated the influence of the distance between a propeller and a wing on the aerodynamic loads on the wing. The swirl flow generated by the propeller was modelled using an actuator disk theory, and the wing's aerodynamics were analysed with the VSPAERO tool. Results of the study were compared to wind tunnel test data and established that both axial and spanwise distance between the propeller and the wing positively affect the wing's lift-to-drag ratio. Specifically, it was observed that the lift-to-drag ratio increases when the propeller is positioned higher than the wing.