Design and Realization of an Unmanned Aerial Rotorcraft Vehicle Using Pressurized Inflatable Structure

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace Volume 6 | Issue 4 Article 3 2019 Design and Realization of an Unmanned Aerial Rotorcraft Vehicle Using Pressurized Inflatable Structure Nirmal Sadasivan NSS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, PALAKKAD, Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.erau.edu/ijaaa Part of the Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics Commons, Aeronautical Vehicles Commons, Multi-Vehicle Systems and Air Traffic Control Commons, Other Aerospace Engineering Commons, and the Systems Engineering and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Commons Scholarly Commons Citation Sadasivan, N. (2019). Design and Realization of an Unmanned Aerial Rotorcraft Vehicle Using Pressurized Inflatable Structure. International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace, 6(4). Retrieved from https://commons.erau.edu/ijaaa/vol6/iss4/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact , . Sadasivan: Design and Realization of an Unmanned Aerial Rotorcraft Vehicle Using Pressurized Inflatable Structure Introduction An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft that can navigate without a human pilot onboard. A ballistic or semiballistic vehicle, cruise missiles, artillery projectiles, torpedoes, mines, and satellites are not considered as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UK MoD, 2011). Depending on the platform and the mission, a broad range of UAV configurations exists (Hassanalian, & Abdelkefi, 2017). Basic classification of UAVs are Fixed wing, Flapping wing, and Rotary wing (Ghazbi, Aghli, Alimohammadi, & Akbari, 2016). Each type has advantages and exhibits inherent limitations. Based on the number and layout of the motors, there are different configurations for rotary wing drones like twin copters, tricopters, quadcopters, pentacopters, hexacopters, octocopters, decacopters, and dodecacopters. Among them, the quad-copters and hexacopters are the bestknown drones (Hassanalian, & Abdelkefi, 2017). Another general categorisation is horizontal take off landing (HTOL) and vertical take-off landing (VTOL) vehicles. The quadrotor has good ranking among VTOL vehicles because of strong flexibility, high energy utilization rate, well‐designed structure and high security (Papa, Pointe, & Core, 2017; Wang, Le, & Fan, (2013). According to Stratistics MRC (2016), the global UAV drone’s market is estimated at $5.93 billion in 2015 and is expected to reach $22.15 billion by 2022 growing at a CAGR of 20.7% from 2015 to 2022. A new forecast study by Markets and Markets (2018) estimates the UAV market that was valued at USD 18.14 Billion in 2017 is to reach USD 52.30 Billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 14.15% from 2018 to 2025. The applications of drones can be categorized based on the type of missions (military/civil), type of the flight zones (outdoor/indoor), and type of the environments (underwater/on the water/ground/air/space) (Hassanalian & Abdelkefi, 2017). The application includes monitoring and surveillance of areas urban traffic (Salvo, Caruso, & Scordo, 2014), coast guard and border patrolling (Kim & Lim, 2018), earth resource monitoring (Berie & Burud, 2018; Murfitt et al., 2017), mapping (Hackney & Clayton, 2015; Jurić-Kaćunić, Librić, & Car, 2016), climate research, such as air composition pollution studies (Villa, Gonzalez, Miljievic, Ristovski, & Morawska, 2016), and environmental protection (Duan & Zhang, 2014), agricultural studies (Psirofonia, Eliopoulos, Samaritakis, & Potamitis, 2017; Puri, Nayyar, & Raja, 2017; Reinecke & Prinsloo, 2017), inspection of electrical power lines (Zhou, Yuan, Yen, & Bastani, 2016), monitoring gas or oil pipelines Ondráček, Vaněk, & Pěchouček, 2014), entertainment (Kim, Jeong, Park, Ryu, & Oh, 2017; Ohta, 2017), search and rescue missions (Choi, Cheon, Kim, & Lee, 2016), mailing and delivery (Lisso, 2017), performing missions in oceans or other planets (Hassanalian, Rice, & Abdelkefi, 2018), and other miscellaneous applications. One of the key parameters for designing a rotary wing vehicle for these applications is to know the requirements of the mission. Flight requirements mainly include endurance duration, payload capacity, the range of flight, speed Published by Scholarly Commons, 2019 1 International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace, Vol. 6 [2019], Iss. 4, Art. 3 and flight altitude. For rotorcraft vehicles, weight is an important parameter (Hassanalian & Abdelkefi, 2017). They are advantageous since they do not require any runways or launching equipment for take-off and landing. While executing a mission, the unique hovering capability of rotorcraft vehicles brings much-enhanced flexibility. However wide-range coverage or long endurance missions are not feasible due to its low-speed and endurance limit (Cetinsoy, 2012; Saeed, Younes, Cai, & Cai, 2018). The current UAV’s flight time is limited because of heavy lift-power needed to take off and maintaining the flight in the air (Hassanalian & Abdelkefi, 2017; Papa et al., 2017). The exposed rotor blades of multirotor vehicles are very dangerous for the animals, birds, as well as for the humans, while perfectly working and under any circumstances of system failure (Edge, Brown, & Collins, 2012). The existing mainstream UAVs are not capable of stealth and are easily spotted and/or heard (Sepulveda & Smith, 2017). These deficiencies cause a significant drop in the potential of unmanned aerial rotorcraft vehicles for various applications. There is a necessity to advance the performance on several ranges of UAV performance for the successful use of these vehicles in expanded future roles. This work presents the design and realization of a rotorcraft using pressurized structure filled with lighter than air gas such as hydrogen or helium to provide lift assistance for the vehicle and thus improve its performance. Related Works The pressurized structure is a generalized term that describes an inflatable UAV component. In 2012, Edge et al.’s research report mentions that different types of UAV designs will require different types of pressurized structure solutions. The most common concepts for UAVs employing inflatable structures are blimps and aerostats. An aerostat is a lighter than air aircraft that achieves its lift through the use of a lighter than air gas. Aerostats include unpowered balloons and powered airships. There are several works that are done on the design of blimps (Boon, 2004; Gawale, 2002; Hollinger, Pezzementi, Flurie, & Maxwell, 2005; Nordestgaard, Ravenscroft, & Bartel, 2007) and aerostat (Callwood, 2014; Kumar, Sati, & Ghosh, 2016; Miller, 2005; Van Dosselaer, 2014). Airships typically have a high length to diameter ratio envelope to decrease the drag. Another concept that is getti (...truncated)