Demo Project

Geometry

The tricopter has dimensions of 2.59 m in length, 2.58 m in width, and 0.556 m in height. The body and hub geometry will be uploaded directly to the app. Propellers for the tricopter will be generated by the app. The radii of the three propellers are 316.3 mm with thrust vector of (0, 0, 1). The location of the three propellers are (-560.6, 822.8, 118.0) mm, (-560.6, -830.3, 118.0) mm, and (1104.7, -2.9, 118.0) mm. The prop curves used for this demo project come from this data.

Run Setup

  • Geopotential Altitude: 0 m
  • No Temperature Offset
  • Ground Clearance: 3 m
  • Roll, Pitch, Yaw: 0 deg
  • Forward Velocity: 0.01 m/s (hover state)
  • Ref Moment Center: (0, 0, 0)
  • Ref Span Length: 2.5898 m
  • Ref Width: 2.5785 m

Select the uploaded body and hub geometry to be included in the simulation. After selecting the propeller assembly, the app will ask for the RPM of each propeller. If the RPM is the same for all propellers, you can enter it in just the first cell and the app will assume the same RPM for the number of generated propellers. For this demo, we will enter 4500 for the RPM.

Actuator disks are generated from the propeller assembly. The disks will be simulated as propellers in the simulation. These disks are only shown in the 3D Viewer and are not included in post-processing images.

Results

Total Forces

Drag should be near 0 N since the tricopter is hovering. We have defined a freestream velocity of 0.01 m/s, therefore, drag will be close to 0 N.

Images

As shown in the gauge pressure plots above, the regions of high pressure are near the propeller hubs.

The above plots show Surface Shear Stress with oilflow.