Parametric Study for Hovering Performance of a Coaxial Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

This paper proposes a reliable aerodynamics analysis method designed for a coaxial rotor unmanned aerial vehicle. It is then used to investigate the effects of the selected design parameters on the hovering performance of the coaxial rotor. A coaxial rotor performance analysis code based on the source-doublet panel method is developed, and its accuracy is verified to be sufficient by comparing its results to various test data. Through a parametric study for the rotor design parameters, such as radius, twist, and taper, the effect of each parameter on the coaxial rotor design is investigated and a statistical analysis for the resulting data is conducted. The results show that the diameter has the biggest impact on the hovering performance of a coaxial rotor, whereas the taper has the biggest impact if the diameter is fixed. Based on these findings, a revised rotor platform is proposed, with 33 % improvement of the figure of merit over the baseline concept, which implies that the optimal design significantly improves the performance of the rotor under development.