Effect of wind disturbance on the aerodynamic performance of coaxial rotors during hovering

Abstract

The ability to resist the effect of wind disturbance is vital for micro air vehicles. As the most compact rotor configuration for micro air vehicles, coaxial rotors will be the preferred choice for this type of devices. In this paper, the aerodynamic performance of the coaxial rotors considering the wind gust is presented with both experiments and simulations. First, effect of wind disturbances on the micro air vehicles flight was introduced. Then, low-speed wind tunnel tests were performed on a coaxial rotor with a spacing 0.39 R to obtain the performance in both horizontal and vertical wind of 0–5 m/s with the revolutions per minute ranging from 1500 to 2400. Finally, computational fluid dynamics simulations, as a means of visualizing the flow field to compensate the intuition of the experimental data, were applied by using the sliding mesh to capture the detailed interference of flow field with the distributions of streamline and velocity vector. Compared with wind tunnel tests, simulation results were highly consistent with experiments that allow to capture the flow details around the rotor tip effectively. In addition, the aerodynamic performance was deteriorated by vortices moving or deforming around the blade tip. Also, coaxial rotors can effectively resist the wind disturbance in the horizontal direction while the rotor performance was found to be declined in the vertical wind.