Ducted Fan Flyer - Design Overview and Roll Moment Control

Karna, Amit & Kaipa, Krishnanand & Ghose, Debasish. (2007). Ducted Fan Flyer - Design Overview and Roll Moment Control. 10.13140/RG.2.2.15523.04646.

This paper presents the preliminary design phases of a ducted-fan micro air vehicle (MAV). This vehicle concept consists of a single multi-blade propeller enclosed within a shroud/duct that acts as the main structure of the vehicle; the spinning propeller sucks air into the shroud producing an upward lift. The shroud guides the air vertically down onto a series of airfoil shaped xed angle stators, which in turn generate lift-forces in a direction perpendicular to, and offset from, the rotor turning-axis. The moments generated by these forces provide the anti-torque that is needed to arrest the roll moment of the body (conventional helicopter uses a tail rotor to achieve the same purpose). As the rotor starts spinning at high speed, hovering is achieved as the lift generated by rotor balances the weight of the vehicle. Vehicle cruising may be achieved, if the outlet air is deviated from exact vertical. In particular, we have built a small prototype of the vehicle and successfully tested the roll moment stabilization in our experiments.

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