Design Optimization, Modeling, and Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Lifted By Coandă Effect

The Coandă effect is a natural phenomenon, which is that flowing fluid on a certain surface is pulled to the surface due to the viscosity of the fluid. This phenomenon can be utilized to produce the lift force of a flying object. This paper presents a new type of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) lifted by the Coandă effect, called SCoandă. We introduce the empirical study of its design and implementations. The principle of the Coandă effect is briefly explained in the first section. The design optimization and control of the UAV, and implementation issues are explained. The structural design of SCoandă is devised to use the maximum lift force produced by the Coandă effect. Since there are a plenty of cases about the shape of SCoandă, it has been limited to oval. It is investigated through computational fluid dynamics. As the result, an optimized design is determined among several candidates and appropriate structural materials are selected via tests. Also, dynamic modeling is suggested under several conditions of SCoandă before simulations are conducted to build up a controller and determine gains according to the dynamic modeling. Finally, the UAV is manufactured and its performances are successfully demonstrated in the indoor and the outdoor environments.