Drone Blade Design

In our last blog post we briefly dis­cussed and illus­trated a smart para­met­ric model of a F1 rear wing, which has been set up for the purpose of opti­miz­ing the aero­dy­namic char­ac­ter­is­tics of the race car. We received a lot of positive feedback on this work, so that we decided to show some more variable CAESES® models in our blog section. This time: blade design for a drone model.

The Chal­lenge: Increase the Aero­dy­namic Lift

One of our col­leagues cur­rently works on the blade design of a drone, in the context of the drone chal­lenge that is ini­ti­ated by a very inter­est­ing German company called SimScale. The goal of this chal­lenge is to optimize the design and per­for­mance of the drone, in par­tic­u­lar, to increase the aero­dy­namic lift of the drone. 

The Blade Model

Our col­league imported the existing baseline of the drone geometry and replaced the blades by a new para­met­ric model. CAESES® comes with spe­cial­ized func­tion­al­ity for the design of rotor blades, which was used to set up the pre­sented blade model. The typical blade profile char­ac­ter­is­tics — such as chord length, camber, thick­ness, pitch, skew etc. — are con­trolled in spanwise direc­tion by a set of function graphs. These graphs are user-defined 2D curves, and the shape of these graphs is usually con­trolled by opti­miza­tion algo­rithms, to conduct fully auto­mated studies and shape opti­miza­tions includ­ing CFD analysis for each design. In the fol­low­ing ani­ma­tions, the graphs are changed manually in order to give you a good under­stand­ing of the CAD model. Check out the fol­low­ing ani­ma­tions which illus­trate the new para­met­ric design of the blade by adding more shape control in each step.

Chord Length Control

Pitch Control

Thick­ness Control

Camber Control

Skew Control

What’s Next?

We keep the fingers crossed for our col­league, and we look forward to see the final results of this study (incl. CFD) that we will also share with you in one of our next blog posts.

Update April 2017
Mean­while, we have been working on several other drone projects and we look forward to discuss your specific model. If you are inter­ested in having a drone blade model ready e.g. for CFD studies or CFD-based shape opti­miza­tion, then please do not hesitate to drop us a line. 

More Infor­ma­tion: Parrot Case Study

There is a case study about drone blade design at Parrot, where CAESES is used as a design and opti­miza­tion platform.