Research of a novel aerodynamic evaluation method for fixed-wing UAV

Abstract The aerodynamic parameters of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play an important role in the newly designed drone. For the purpose of the real-time measurement of the aerodynamic performance parameters of the UAV in flight status, based on the self-development connected-wing configuration airplane, a novel airborne aerodynamics test scheme is researched and verified in this work. The findings of this study indicate that the effectiveness of numerical calculations can be verified by comparison with both results of the numerical simulation and airborne flight test in the same conditions. The newly designed UAV equipped with this test system in the future, not only achieves quick and reliable results of aerodynamic performance and powered system efficiency but also can save the expense of wind tunnel experiments, which is of high potential to the UAV application.