Document Type
Honors Thesis
Abstract
Drag estimation is of significant value in the design of any aircraft, whether it may be fixed wing or rotorcraft. Drag has a heavy influence on the aircraft’s performance including its lift, which in turn impacts the aircraft’s geometry, weight, and amount of fuel required. In the design process where several configurations are tested for their performance to meet the mission requirements in the most optimum way, it is not feasible economically nor an efficient use of time to create a wind tunnel or computational fluid dynamic analysis to find the drag. This report explores the implementation of an age-old component buildup method of drag calculation in a parametric computer-based MATLAB model to find the drag for a FARA rotorcraft configuration. The issue with component buildup is that it is cumbersome. However, with the advent of computation and programming, it is ideal to create a modular program for drag calculation. The categories of bodies of revolution and lifting surfaces used in component buildup can be directly implemented into MATLAB to create a versatile program, which can account for varying configurations of preliminary designs, as well as calculate drag to a fraction of a second. This report demonstrates the implementation of this technique and calculates the drag of the co-ax configuration assigned to the honors group in the senior design project.
Publication Date
5-1-2020
Language
English
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Mhowwala, Ali, "DEVELOPMENT OF A PARAMETERIZED DRAG MODEL FOR ROTORCRAFT" (2020). 2020 Spring Honors Capstone Projects. 45.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/honors_spring2020/45