Preliminary Power Analysis of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle : Featuring Integrated Electric Ducted Fans

Sammanfattning

With increasing focus on climate change more research for net-zero emission are being made in the aviation industry.This project focuses on electric propulsion on a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a blended wing body (BWB) design. More specifically finding a solution for a propulsion system using electric ducted fan (EDF) engines for a scaled version of the KTH Aerospace project Green Raven. The system consists of a powerplant and power supply i.e engine(s) and a sufficient battery package. The goal is to find a solution to power this 7 kg aerial vehicle for 60 minutes with a consistent cruising speed of 30 m/s. To accomplish this an understanding of thrust and drag profile is essential in order to determine the requirements for the EDFs. Understanding the limitations of the scaled Green Raven is also necessary in order to provide a feasible solution for power supply. The result is to use 2x 50 mm EDF engines providing a total thrust of 16.7 Newtons that is integrated in the main body. To supply these engines two battery sets (one per EDF) composed of three different battery types have been chosen, giving a total capacity of 24 000 mAh for one hour flight time. This propulsion setup fulfils the requirements, though not without flaws because of the choice of integrating the EDFs. An alternative solution would be having the engines externally mounted in order to free up the space in the body for more efficient batteries.