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Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics Commons

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Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Computational Fluid Dynamics

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Full-Text Articles in Aerodynamics and Fluid Mechanics

Development And Deployment Of A Dynamic Soaring Capable Uav Using Reinforcement Learning, Jacob Adamski Dec 2022

Development And Deployment Of A Dynamic Soaring Capable Uav Using Reinforcement Learning, Jacob Adamski

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Dynamic soaring (DS) is a bio-inspired flight maneuver in which energy can be gained by flying through regions of vertical wind gradient such as the wind shear layer. With reinforcement learning (RL), a fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be trained to perform DS maneuvers optimally for a variety of wind shear conditions. To accomplish this task, a 6-degreesof- freedom (6DoF) flight simulation environment in MATLAB and Simulink has been developed which is based upon an off-the-shelf unmanned aerobatic glider. A combination of high-fidelity Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in ANSYS Fluent and low-fidelity vortex lattice (VLM) …


Influence Of Wing Planform Shape On The Effectiveness Of A Fixed-Slot, Yuan Zhao Apr 2022

Influence Of Wing Planform Shape On The Effectiveness Of A Fixed-Slot, Yuan Zhao

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This thesis report explores the effect of the Clark-Y wing geometry on lift and drag to use as a reference during aircraft design stage. The different characteristics investigated are fixed slot span, taper ratio, washout, and sweep angle. Plain wings, half slotted wings, and fully slotted wings were built in CATIA with an aspect ratio of 6 and different taper ratio, washout, and sweep angles. Using the CATIA models to generate the 3-D grids in Pointwise. All the simulations were tested in Ansys-Fluent under sea-level conditions with a Reynold number of 609000. The relationships between the aerodynamic characteristics and the …