TY - JOUR
T1 - Designing the Ornicopter, a tailless helicopter with active flapping blades
T2 - a case study
AU - Wan, Jia
AU - Pavel, Marilena
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - The Ornicopter concept is a single-rotor, tailless configuration. By actively flapping its blades, the Ornicopter rotor can propel itself to rotate, and hence does not need a tail rotor. In previous research, the Ornicopter concept has been compared with the Bo-105 conventional helicopter from various aspects, while the Ornicopter has the same design parameters as the Bo-105. Comparisons show that the Ornicopter has one major drawback, namely a small flight envelope. To improve the Ornicopter performance and understand how the Ornicopter should be designed, in this paper, the Ornicopter design is unfrozen and optimized for the flight envelope. The optimization result shows that with a proper design, the Ornicopter performance can be improved dramatically. A similar flight envelope as the Bo-105 can be achieved for the Ornicopter. However, the Ornicopter requires higher power than the Bo-105 due to the inherent characteristics of this concept.
AB - The Ornicopter concept is a single-rotor, tailless configuration. By actively flapping its blades, the Ornicopter rotor can propel itself to rotate, and hence does not need a tail rotor. In previous research, the Ornicopter concept has been compared with the Bo-105 conventional helicopter from various aspects, while the Ornicopter has the same design parameters as the Bo-105. Comparisons show that the Ornicopter has one major drawback, namely a small flight envelope. To improve the Ornicopter performance and understand how the Ornicopter should be designed, in this paper, the Ornicopter design is unfrozen and optimized for the flight envelope. The optimization result shows that with a proper design, the Ornicopter performance can be improved dramatically. A similar flight envelope as the Bo-105 can be achieved for the Ornicopter. However, the Ornicopter requires higher power than the Bo-105 due to the inherent characteristics of this concept.
KW - Ornicopter
KW - tailless
KW - conceptual design
KW - performance
UR - http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4e9a345d-9ad4-4601-b2cf-064377f0ec55
U2 - 10.1177/0954410015622228
DO - 10.1177/0954410015622228
M3 - Article
SN - 0893-1321
VL - 230
SP - 2195
EP - 2219
JO - Journal of Aerospace Engineering
JF - Journal of Aerospace Engineering
IS - 12
ER -