Conceptual Design and Analysis of a Fixed Wing Mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Humanitarian Assistance Operations

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-1504.vid Application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civilian and humanitarian roles is evolving these days. M/s Zipline, a US based company has recently demonstrated use of a fixed wing mini UAV for medical logistics. The publically available data of Zipline UAV suggests that the present capability is limited to 1.5 Kg of medical supplies delivered using parachute mechanism. The proposed research question is whether the current payload capacity of 1.5 Kg can be increased by undertaking UAV design process on the lines of traditional aircraft conceptual design process. Therefore, conceptual UAV design process on the lines of aircraft conventional design process is undertaken. Various tools such as MS Excel, VSP 3.0, XFLR 5, CATIA V5 and ANSYS 16 are used during various stages of the conceptual design process.