Biplane Wing Gap Influence Study of UAV with Wing-shaped Fuselage using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Since the growing trend of UAV-based delivery, some major logistic companies initiate to develop a UAV-based delivery service. UAV-based delivery needs to have a long flight range while maintaining the advantage of fly and land in narrow areas. Therefore, hybrid aircraft that combining fixed wing with multirotor configuration is commonly used. In this study, the airframe that is used for analysis is a quadrotor biplane-tailsitter with a wing-shaped fuselage configuration. To create a proper design, understanding the influence of the UAV's body with the air is essential. The purpose of this research comes from the idea that in biplane configuration, both wings affect each other and interacting with the wing-shaped fuselage. This research aims to evaluate the current wing gap configuration, compare the performance with different wing gaps, and investigate the flow patterns. In this paper, aerodynamic performance is analyzed in 4 wing gap variations, namely 2.5 chords, 3 chords, 4 chords, and 5 chords length with the wing chord as the reference value. The flight condition is 25 m/s and the angle of attack is varied from −10 to 26 degrees. The most optimum aerodynamic performance occurs in 4 chords length of the biplane wing gap.