Roter Blade Design For A Coaxial Helicopter In Martian Atmosphere In Hover And Forward Flight

Abstract

This paper outlines the design process of rotor blades of a Martian coaxial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to scout the Valles Marineris for subsequent exploration by rovers. The low atmospheric density causes performance degradation of conventional airfoils and lower aerodynamic damping [8]. This necessitates performance optimized, lightweight rotor blades with high stiffness. The paper presents the aeromechanic mid-fidelity CAMRAD II model [4] to assess the rotor blade performance and the following design process for of the rotor blades. Different rotor platforms are compared to serve as baseline for the following optimization for forward flight. To reduce the dominating profile power, the chord length of the blade was reduced at the tip and increased towards the centre, which led to savings in the total power of 3.17 %. Twist has been reduced in comparison to a hover optimized blade to -7.5 degrees linear twist.