Modeling MAV Response in Gusty Urban Environment

Abstract

The article discusses an airfoil unsteady aerodynamic response to upstream unsteady flow disturbances in flow regimes characteristic of Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) applications. Because of their small size and speed, the flight control of these vehicles in gusty urban environments poses tremendous challenges addressed in the current work. Following a thorough review of experimental and numerical studies characterizing various scales and configurations of urban flow disturbances, three canonical gust models are proposed corresponding to the time-harmonic gust, the sharp-edge gust, and the Taylor vortex. A high-accuracy numerical analysis is applied to examine MAV airfoil response to such perturbations and conclude on relative importance of contributing viscous and inviscid forces.