Design and Optimization of SUAV Empennage

Now a days the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is getting common, as its size varies from small to large, which has good parameters like, light weight and good stability and can be used for surveillance, agriculture, and in defense as it can be controlled from ground or from other aircraft.

In an UAV wing is blended with fuselage which gives lift to the UAV and the tail is also used for take-off and landing which is also gives higher stability to aircraft. It is important to design an empennage structure at lower drag and for good stability characteristics.

In this present project airfoil coordinates has been generated by using JAVAFOIL, in this project NACA0010 airfoil is created, which is imported to CATIA V5 to design different empennage configurations of same wetted area and UAV empennage has been finally designed in a modeling tool CATIA V5 R19.The model is imported to Ansys through IGES file to simulate CFD analysis, where for analyzing fine meshing is taken for the whole structure of UAV and further CFD flow analysis is done through Ansys CFX software. The results for C_L, C_D and L/D are obtained by varying AOA with different velocity as shown in graphs (fig 13 to 18). A comparison is made for these empennages to check the aerodynamic efficiency and stability created by the different SUAV tails.