Investigation of a high-thrust guide for multirotor drone

Abstract

The effect of an annular L-shaped guide on the thrust improvement of quadcopter is experimentally investigated for ascent and descent conditions. The proposed guide has a side plate perpendicular to the rotational plane and a bottom plate outside the rotor blades. A multirotor model, which consists of four rotors and surrounding guide, is placed parallel or antiparallel to the freestream. The thrust generated by the model is then measured under the condition that all rotors rotate at the same rotation speed. As a result, it is found that the thrust coefficient increases when the advance ratio is small, though it is relatively small compared to the single rotor case. The guide loses effectiveness in high ascent and descent conditions because the drag of the model becomes larger by its bottom plate.