Honors Theses

Advisor

Sidaard Gunasekaran, Ph.D.

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Publication Date

4-23-2025

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Abstract

Strategic placement of the rotors in a non-planar configuration can improve power efficiency in multirotor aircraft. To validate this concept, a custom-built multirotor was developed to conduct flight tests based on a prior wind tunnel study at the University of Dayton. The original study, conducted in the University of Dayton Low Speed Wind Tunnel (UD-LSWT), demonstrated that a negatively staggered rotor configuration with a vertical offset of 60% of the propeller diameter (0.6 dz) maximized power savings of individual rotors tested in tandem configuration. Flight test data confirmed improved power efficiency in negatively staggered configurations, achieving up to 18% power savings compared to a conventional configuration without vertical offset, thereby indicating the practical viability of such configurations. However, flight testing also revealed that, at higher flight speeds, offsets beyond 0.2 dz yielded diminishing returns, a trend not observed in the prior study. This discrepancy was investigated through unpowered drag characterization of the multirotor in the UD-LSWT, which showed a nonlinear increase in drag with offset, especially at higher velocities. As a result, a 0.2 dz offset was identified as the optimal configuration for the tested flight regime, as it balanced trade-offs between power efficiency and drag-induced performance losses. Though multirotor mass was held constant in this study, performance benefits of vertical offset are only realized if they outweigh penalties associated with increased structural mass, which is more easily mitigated in a 0.2 dz configuration.

Permission Statement

This item is protected by copyright law (Title 17, U.S. Code) and may only be used for noncommercial, educational, and scholarly purposes.

Keywords

Undergraduate research

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