Development of a 3D-printed device evaluating the aerodynamic performance of rotary wings

Abstract

Applications for remotely operated rotary wing aerial vehicles, hereafter referred to as drones, are rapidly expanding in scope and such aircraft may soon become an integral part of everyday life as well as a source of innovation. However, it is quite difficult to improve drone flight performance and reduce development costs because performance optimization depends strongly on the intended application. As a result, drones are currently developed by trial and error using various rotary wing shapes. In this study, a device for evaluating the aerodynamic performance of rotary wings is proposed. We consider it likely that our proposed device will be useful for various drone-related applications in addition to facilitating drone development because it is inexpensive to produce and can eliminate the need for large expensive laboratory equipment such as wind tunnels when performing flight characteristic evaluations. In this paper, we report on the fabrication of our 3D general fused deposition modeling (FDM) printed device along with some experimental results.