Abstract:
Micro air vehicle (MAV) is defined as unmanned air vehicles with wing to wing span of 15 cm
and weight not more than 100 grams, specifications defined by American Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA). MAV finds its applications in surveillance, rescues and
other strategic military purposes. The design of a Micro air vehicle (MAV) is an emerging new
area of current research. Especially, the problem of aerodynamic behavior of the flapping wing
of an mav is a very challenging problem for researchers. It is particularly helpful for design and
development of Micro Air Vehicles where optimized lift and thrust generation is very much
required. In the present research, the impact of airfoil shapes on the flapping performance has
been investigated by comparing the lift and drag coefficients by using three different airfoils
which include flat plate, ellipse and NACA0014 of same thickness in pure plunging motion.
Computations were carried out at various Reynolds number that cover entire spectrum from
fully laminar to fully turbulent flow regime and at various reduced frequencies in order to
explore behavior of different shapes of airfoils and their correlation with Reynolds number and
reduced frequencies. Unsteady incompressible Navier Stokes equations in this study were
solved assuming flow to be laminar at low Reynolds number whereas for high Reynolds S-A
turbulence model has been used to carry out computations. O-type grid has been used to
descretize the computational domain. Results obtained show that the airfoil shape has strong
influence on flapping performance and its correlation with the Reynolds number and reduced
frequency has also been found which leads to the conclusion that at high Reynolds number and
for higher reduced frequencies, shaped airfoils that is NAC0014 produces best thrust.
