Design of a Flying Wing to Convert an Existing Multirotor UAV into a VTOL Aircraft

This dissertation contributes to one of the projects being developed by the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) business unit of the Portuguese Centre of Engineering and Product Development (CEiiA). The project’s objective is to develop a modular vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of performing long-range missions and operating in urban environments through a removable wing system. The present work details the preliminary aerodynamic and structural development of a wing that can be integrated with the multirotor developed by the AAM business unit. A literature review was conducted on topics such as aircraft design, aircraft structures, composite structures, and VTOL UAV technologies. This was followed by the conceptual design of the wing, which takes into account the requirements of the business unit and the constraints imposed by the multirotor’s geometry to create several different configurations. The feasible configurations were evaluated and subsequently narrowed down until a baseline design was established. An airfoil selection, an assessment of the component’s arrangement, the design of an aerodynamic wing model, and a stability analysis were performed using the Flow5 software. All of these parameters were determined and evaluated based on examples or typical restrictions found in the literature, with the exception of the wing design, which required an iterative method that was defined specifically for this case. A thrust-to-weight ratio constraint analysis was employed to select an appropriate motor and propeller for the forward flight propulsive system (FFPS). Additionally, a performance analysis was conducted considering the aerodynamic characteristics of the wing, the mission profile, the selected battery, and the characteristics of the FFPS to determine the range and endurance of the UAV. A computer-aided design model of the wing and its internal structure was developed using SolidWorks, based on the dimensions of the aerodynamic wing model and the structural ...