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DESIGN AND TEST OF A UAV BLENDED WING BODY CONFIGURATION

Conference Paper · January 2012

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 DESIGN AND TEST OF A UAV BLENDED WING BODY
CONFIGURATION
Kai Lehmkuehler∗ , KC Wong∗ and Dries Verstraete∗
∗ School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney,
Australia
kai.lehmkuehler@sydney.edu.au

Keywords: Blended Wing Body, UAV, Wind tunnel, Stability, Propulsion Effects

Abstract eration of lift and the aircraft can be shaped for

an optimal lift distribution. Typically they also
This paper presents the design and test of a UAV are tailless flying wings which potentially further
blended wing body configuration. It is the re- reduces the drag.
sult of a global student design project between The use of BWBs for full scale transport air-
the University of Sydney, the University of Col- craft is still some time away due to several prob-
orado and the University of Stuttgart. Firstly, lems; mainly the compliance with current reg-
the design methodology and constraints are in- ulations is difficult if not impossible (passenger
troduced. Then the wind tunnel test setup is de- evacuation, aircraft control without artificial sta-
scribed and the data presented. Finally, an engi- bility and so on). Another application for a BWB
neering method to predict the propulsion effects might be a smaller, unmanned platform, where
on this unusual airframe is described. most of these constraints do not apply but high
Comparison between the wind tunnel data efficiency and large internal volume are required.
and panel code predictions shows good agree- Therefore the aim of this project is to design and
ment, also reinforced by successful flight tests. test a small scale BWB and to determine if the
Propulsion effects on a low stability airframe platform is a viable configuration as a UAV.
can be serious and need to be considered during The aircraft discussed in this paper is the first
the design to avoid possible instabilities. The iteration of the project. It was designed for the
method presented allows for a quick estimate international Hyperion project, which was a co-
without tedious computations or tests. operation of student teams from Sydney, Aus-
tralia, Stuttgart, Germany and Colorado, USA.
1 Introduction The Sydney team was tasked with the airframe
conceptual design and the wind tunnel testing.
Blended wing body (BWB) configurations have The plane was built in Germany and the US,
attracted considerable interest lately as an alter- where it was flown successfully in April 2011.
native, more efficient platform for transport air- This paper will outline the design and testing
craft [1][2]. In conventional tube-wing config- conducted before the first flight. Future publica-
urations the fuselage typically contributes only tions will cover the flight testing and the continu-
minor amounts of lift while adding considerable ing development of the platform.
skin friction drag as well as a disruption of the
lift distribution across the wing. BWBs locate
their payload volume inside the wing such that
the entire external surface contributes to the gen-

1
 KAI LEHMKUEHLER, KC WONG AND DRIES VERSTRAETE

2 Design Methodology

There was a constraint of 9 calender months to

take the project from requirement definition to
first flight. Thus time was limited for the concep-
tual design phase. Subsequently, the focus was
put on stability and control of the aircraft, with
an optimisation for minimum drag to follow in a
later stage.
A tailless aircraft has some unique require-
ments for stable flight especially in the pitch axis.
The moment arm between the CG and the eleva- Fig. 1 PanAir model with pressure distribution
tor is short and the design is a compromise be- and surface flow directions
tween the static margin and the elevator effective-
ness. The two extremes are:
1. A forward neutral point (NP) gives good
elevator effectiveness but it will be difficult All BWBs currently under investigation in lit-
to place the CG sufficiently forward of the erature have highly swept wings for their tran-
NP to ensure pitch stability. sonic flight regime. As this aircraft is flying sub-
sonic at all times the wing sweep was limited to
2. An aft NP allows for a more practical CG 15 degrees (for roll stability) to avoid tip stall ten-
placement but the elevator moment arm be- dencies associated with higher sweep at high lift
comes shorter which makes trim difficult coefficients.
with sensible elevator sizes. In this ar- As for any flying wing, the aerofoils used re-
rangement it is also difficult to achieve ap- quire a very low moment coefficient, which typi-
propriate pitch damping. cally leads to reflexed sections. For a small UAV
The preliminary design was done in AVL [3], the low flight speed and wing chord also requires
which allows for quick evaluations of different good performance at low Reynolds numbers. The
airframe shapes with immediate output of all sta- aerofoils for the plane were selected based on
bility derivatives. The design was later investi- the excellent website for model aircraft builders
gated with PanAir [4], a fully 3-d panel code, and [6], which provides comprehensive information
the results compared to AVL and the wind tunnel on low Reynolds number, low pitching moment
data. aerofoils. The chosen section was the S5010 [7]
The basic parameters for the aircraft were: aerofoil, which is 10% thick. For the body sec-
16kg MTOW, 3m span and 15m/s stall speed. tion, the aerofoil was modified in X-Foil [8] into
Together with the general requirements of a fly- a S5016 with 16% thickness to provide the re-
ing wing mentioned above, this placed some very quired volume.
difficult constraints on the design, especially for The design process for the shape of the air-
the test flights in Colorado which is at an alti- craft was basically a manual exploration of the
tude of 1600m above sea level. A BWB cannot design space with several configurations and
have flaps due to the additional pitching moment. trends examined by hand until an arrangement
Hence the clean airframe had to produce a maxi- was found to fit the requirements. A formal op-
mum lift coefficient of at least 0.8, which is more timisation process was not possible due to the
than has been reported by other designs of this time constraints. Further work since then has de-
type [5]. The constraint on the wing span limited termined that within the requirements and con-
the aspect ratio and therefore the maximum wing straints there is no significant improvement pos-
area possible. sible unless the wingspan constraint was relaxed.

2
 Blended Wing Body UAV

The final airframe shown in Figures 1 and

12 features a tractor propeller in the nose, which
was chosen over an initial pusher concept mainly
because of clearance issues during rotation and
weight and balance advantages. The propeller is
also more efficient when not running in the flow
field of the main body. Other configuration deci-
sions include:

• A single large elevator 20% of the main

body chord to ensure enough control power
for all flight phases;

• Twin fins on each side of the elevator the

size of which was determined from the sug-
gested values for the weathercock stability
Cnβ in [9];

• Upwards canted swept back wing tips for Fig. 2 CAD model of the new 6 axis wind tunnel
additional dihedral; balance
• Tricycle landing gear; and

• The final wing area being 1.53 sqm with a The model was constructed using the recent
body length of 1.25m. in-house completed CNC hot wire cutter, which
was built by the UAV design group. The machine
3 Wind Tunnel Set-up allows to cut linearly tapered foam blocks with
good precision but it cannot generate the curva-
The department’s 7x5 feet low speed wind tun- tures required for the blended shape. These were
nel was the ideal venue for testing this airframe, finished by hand after the assembly of the blocks
as it could accommodate a half-scale model at the into the complete airframe. This method of con-
required speed range to match the Reynolds num- struction allows for a reasonably quick model
bers between the test and the flight airframe. construction on a limited budget but the final re-
To perform the tests for this aircraft, the full sult has inevitably some tolerances due to the
flight envelope in angle of attack and sideslip was small scale and manual re-work. This was to
required. The existing balance could move only show up later in the wind tunnel results but were
in angle of attack with the model suspended from considered acceptable for this first demonstrator
the roof. It was thus required to design a new bal- airframe. A second limitation for the testing is
ance using the existing turntable mechanism. The the lack of stiffness of the available load cell in
design chosen was a single sting balance with an the roll axis. Hence the model vibrates slightly in
internal loadcell as shown in Figure 2. The model roll, especially near stall, where the vortex shed-
is driven by an actuator in angle of attack on top ding from the wing tips becomes more severe. As
of the sting and the entire mechanism rotates in expected, the roll moment data shows more error
sideslip on the turntable. The loadcell process- than the other axes but the data was still usable as
ing and the motion control is handled in a newly discussed below.
developed graphical MatLab application, which The model features an interchangeable nose
allows control of all features from a single GUI. section for powered testing and removable wing
An image of the setup is shown in Figure 3. tips to evaluate different designs.

3
 KAI LEHMKUEHLER, KC WONG AND DRIES VERSTRAETE

Fig. 3 Wind tunnel installation with fairings removed

4 Test Results for the Unpowered Airframe 5.9, so the slope of the lift curve is low as ex-
pected.
This section presents the test results for the half-
scale airframe model using the new balance. The CLα experiment 4.15 / rad
data represents the current status of maturing ex- CLα PanAir 4.23 / rad
perimental setup. Thus some minor errors are CLα AVL 4.016 / rad
expected to be in the data. The data has been CL,max experiment 0.946
corrected for the changing gravity vector during
angle of attack changes but no corrections have
been applied for wind tunnel effects like block- 1.2

age. Those are still under investigation.

1
All data is reported at 20m/s tunnel speed,
which represents a Reynolds number of 450,000 0.8

based on the mean aerodynamic chord. Where 0.6

applicable, changes due to different airspeeds are

L

0.4
C

discussed. On all plots blue dots represents the

experimental data points, solid red the appropri- 0.2

ate fit and dashed black the data from PanAir. As 0

a comparison, data from AVL has been included,

−0.2
too to judge the performance of this code against
PanAir for an unusual airframe concept. −0.4
−4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
α [deg]

4.1 Lift Fig. 4 Lift coefficient at 20 m/s

The lift curve shown in Figure 4 matches the pre-

dictions closely. The error is less than 2% at The maximum lift coefficient increases with
20m/s. At lower speeds the difference reduces airspeed to 0.96 from 0.93 at 13m/s. This is
(no error at 13m/s) and it increases with airspeed. caused by the increase in Reynolds number over
The aircraft has a relatively low aspect ratio of the wings.

4
 Blended Wing Body UAV

0.25
The stall pattern is well behaved with flow
separation starting at the inboard wing joint as
predicted. The wing tips with the sharp break in 0.2

the leading edge stall at about the same time but

the flow separation does not spread inboard. The 0.15

shape of the wing tips is currently under revision

CD
for that reason. 0.1

4.2 Drag 0.05

The drag polar in Figure 5 shows a small shift

0
between the experiment and the predictions. The −0.4 −0.2 0 0.2
CL
0.4 0.6 0.8 1

wind tunnel data has the minimum drag at CL ≈

0.1 compared to CL ≈ 0.05 from PanAir. This can Fig. 5 Drag polar at 20 m/s
be caused by small differences in the geometry of
the model to the PanAir geometry. 20

The span efficiency is generally lower than

the inviscid predictions up until 30m/s, where it 15

then matches. This is caused by the low Reynolds 10

numbers, which are not taken into account by the

panel methods. The AVL prediction for the span
L/D (incl. CD0)

efficiency is very optimistic, with the difference 0

caused mainly by small differences compared to

PanAir around the zero-lift drag. This leads to −5

large changes in the quadratic fit used to find e.

−10

Span efficiency e experiment 0.72 −15

−4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
α [deg]
Span efficiency e PanAir 0.77
Span efficiency e AVL 0.98 Fig. 6 L/D at 20 m/s
CD,0 experiment 0.015

As mentioned before, this aircraft was mainly

formance gain of the blended airframe and should
designed for stability and control properties with
be avoided.
only limited effort on optimising the flight per-
The combination of low aspect ratio and high
formance. The high induced drag has since then
induced drag results in a maximum L/D of 19.3
been investigated and identified to be caused by
as shown in Figure 6. While this should improve
the sudden, large change in chord in the body-
in future versions of the airframe, it is still a re-
wing transition and the low aspect ratio. These
spectable value for a low aspect ratio aeroplane
findings will be used for the next iteration of the
at low Reynolds numbers.
vehicle design.
A model aeroplane style fixed landing gear 4.3 Pitching Moment
has also been tested in the wind tunnel. On
this scale a landing gear is usually large com- There is a 8% error in the pitching moment slope
pared to the rest of the airframe dimensions to as shown in Figure 7. This is mainly caused by
deal with rough landing strips used to fly these the limited accuracy of the model (especially the
planes. Here the landing gear adds about 30% to reflexed aerofoils on the wings) and also some
the zero lift drag. Clearly, this eliminates any per- uncertainty in the location of the mounting point

5
 KAI LEHMKUEHLER, KC WONG AND DRIES VERSTRAETE

for the loadcell. A change in CG position of only about the roll axis on the loadcell as discussed
3mm eliminates the error completely. before.
The CG range of the aircraft is very small, The value of the derivative matches the AVL
with only 30mm between instability and the lim- prediction quite well but there is a large error to
its of the elevator effectiveness. The flight CG the PanAir computation. The reason for this error
has been placed at x = 0.6m based on pilot com- has not yet been determined.
ments.
The landing gear tests revealed only negligi- Clβ experiment -0.059 / rad
ble increases in nose down pitching moment due Clβ PanAir -0.0258 / rad
to the additional drag of the gear. Clβ AVL -0.059 / rad

Cmα experiment -0.57 / rad −3

x 10
2
Cmα PanAir -0.62 / rad
Cmα AVL -0.564 / rad
0
NP experiment 0.646 m
−2

0.05
Cl
−4

Cl = −0.0590
b
0 −6 Cl (PanAir)= −0.0258
b

−8
−0.05
Cm

−10
−4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10
−0.1 β [deg]

−0.15
Fig. 8 Rolling moment at 20m/s

−0.2
−4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
The airframe has no dihedral for ease of con-
α [deg]
struction and was designed to obtain its roll sta-
Fig. 7 Pitching moment at 20m/s with Xre f = 0.55m bility from the limited wing sweep and the body-
wing flow field. The upward canted wing tips
provide further stability but this is not really re-
quired, based on the first flight tests.
4.4 Side force
4.6 Yawing moment
The side force derivative shows good agreement
between predictions and the experiment. The yawing moment shown in Figure 9 is slightly
stiffer than predicted but the derivative is still be-
Cyβ experiment -0.1863 / rad low the recommended value of Cnβ = 0.05 [9].
Cyβ PanAir -0.1835 / rad This can be easily fixed by slightly larger fins but
Cyβ AVL -0.187 / rad again has been found to be not necessary during
the initial flight tests.
4.5 Rolling moment
Cnβ experiment 0.0365 / rad
The experimental data for the rolling moment in Cnβ PanAir 0.033 / rad
Figure 8 shows more fluctuations than the other Cnβ AVL 0.03445 / rad
axes. This is due to the vibrations of the model

6
 Blended Wing Body UAV

−3
x 10
7

3
Cn

−1
Cn = 0.0365
b
−2 Cn (PanAir)= 0.0330
b

−3
−4 −2 0 2 4 6 8 10
β [deg]

Fig. 9 Yawing moment at 20m/s

Fig. 10 First flight of the full scale Hyperion
BWB in Boulder, Colorado

4.7 Pilot feedback

The airframe has been flown by several pilots, 5 Propulsion Effects

full (Figure 10) and half-scale versions in the
U.S.A. and a half-scale version in Australia. Pi- Any airframe shows some effect of its propul-
lots’ feedback on the handling qualities reported sion system on its stability characteristics [10].
good characteristics in flight and some difficulties For example, on a conventional, propeller-driven
on take-off and landing. In flight, the aircraft was general aviation aircraft, the swirl of the prop
reported quite stable in all three axes with some wash impacting the vertical stabilizer causes a
minor adverse yaw. It was well controllable in yawing moment. Likewise, on a jet with under-
all manoeuvres tested with well damped modes wing engines there is a thrust dependent pitch up
of motion. The amount of elevator to trim is rela- effect.
tively large but this is expected for a flying wing This BWB configuration with a tractor pro-
configuration. peller in the nose shows an additional behaviour.
On take-off, a reduced longitudinal stability The propeller is effectively blowing the inboard
was observed due to propulsion effects as dis- sections of the body behind it, causing a locally
cussed below. This was manageable in the U.S.A. different dynamic pressure over these aerofoils.
as the flights there were done on a sealed run- This thrust and airspeed dependent effect changes
way and therefore very limited disturbances dur- the moment balance between the the body and
ing the critical speed range. In Australia, there is the outer wings. As the body creates more lift
no convenient access to such a runway, so grass in the slipstream compared to the non-powered
fields were used. Here the natural unevenness of airframe, its more forward neutral point becomes
the ground has caused more severe issues during more dominant and the overall NP moves for-
the take-off run with several premature lift-offs ward. With the limited CG range of the config-
below rotation speed. uration, this may have a severe effect, as the NP
On landing, the reduced pitch damping makes could potentially move in front of the CG during
it difficult to flare due to phugoid oscillations. low airspeed, full power flight conditions, caus-
This issue can be improved with better pilot train- ing pitch instability.
ing but it is intended that subsequent designs will With the limited time frame of the project
improve on these undesired handling qualities. spent predominantly with the basic design and

7
 KAI LEHMKUEHLER, KC WONG AND DRIES VERSTRAETE

testing, this effect was not investigated until 35

shortly before the first flight. After it became

apparent that this might have catastrophic effects
during the take-off run, a quick method to esti- 30

Slipstream Vel [m/s]

mate the magnitude of the NP movement was re-
quired. Further wind tunnel work was impossible
at that stage and there is no quick way of simu- 25

lating these non-uniform inflows in the analysis

tool used for this project. Thus a method was de-
20
vised using the PanAir results, which is presented 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
Prop Station
0.7 0.8 0.9 1

below.
PanAir reports all forces and moments for the Fig. 11 Slipstream velocities for full power at
entire airframe and also for each parallel, span- V∞ = 20m/s
wise panel strip (Figure 12) from the leading
edge to the trailing edge. Instead of calculating
the NP from the full aircraft data with
3. Dimensionalise the lift and pitching mo-
Cmα ment of every strip using the local dynamic
X̄NP = X̄CG − (1) pressure to obtain the actual forces and mo-
CLα
ments acting on each strip.
it is possible to calculate the NP of every strip
and find the overall NP by a weighted average of 4. Determine the NP of every strip using eq.
all strips. Then, using the velocity profile behind 1. This requires a PanAir solution at two
a propeller from a blade element code, each strip angles of attack to determine the lift- and
can be adjusted to the local dynamic pressure to moment curve slopes.
simulate the effect of the prop-wash. The steps in
detail: 5. Calculate the NP of the aircraft by apply-
ing a weighted average for each strip based
1. Determine the slipstream velocity distribu- on the amount of lift produced compared to
tion for the propeller with a blade element the total lift.
code. The propeller for the aircraft had 4-
blades and 20 inch diameter. As the aero- 6. Compare the result to the NP of the unpow-
foils on the model aircraft propellers are ered aircraft for several airspeeds.
usually not known, a simple Clark Y sec-
tion was run in X-foil at the 75% station After adjusting the NP of the PanAir results
at full power. Here the propeller speed to match the wind tunnel results by a small ref-
was 8000 RPM, giving a Reynolds num- erence point change as mentioned above, a test
ber of 230000 at Mach 0.5. The lift curve case with zero slipstream yields Xnp = 0.645m
and drag polar at that flow condition were vs. Xnp = 0.644m for the full aircraft calculation.
determined and used in the blade element This small difference is probably caused by in-
code. Tip losses were added by imposing ternal round off errors as the coefficients are only
zero velocity at the propeller tips. The pro- available to 5 digits in the PanAir solution file.
peller had 10 inch geometric twist along A further source of error might be the weighted
the blade. averaging based on the lift produced per strip.
However, the difference is small for practical use,
2. Using this data shown in Figure 11, the lo- so no further improvements were attempted.
cal dynamic pressure seen by every strip Crucial for the method to predict useful re-
can be interpolated. sults is the number of panel strips affected by the

8
 Blended Wing Body UAV

0.66

0.65

0.64

0.63

0.62

Xnp [m]
0.61

0.6

0.59

Experiment half scale 450W

0.58 Experiment windmilling
PanAir prediction 10 strips
PanAir prediction 12 strips

5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Speed [m/s]

Fig. 13 NP changes due to propulsion effects (In-

dicated are the stall speed and flight CG)

The result of these computations show a NP

shift forward during slow, high power conditions
from Xnp = 0.645m to Xnp = 0.61m at stall speed.
That means that the static margin just before ro-
tation is reduced to 1.4%, down from 6.4% at
Fig. 12 Propeller slipstream distribution (As- cruise. This is clearly a severe effect and was
sumption blue (top), Experiment green (bottom) observed during the take off runs preceding first
flight with the aircraft pitching up uncontrollably
during acceleration. Subsequently, based on this
analysis, the CG was placed further forward and
slipstream. Several graphs of propeller body in- the flight was a success.
terference are given in [11]. There it can be seen
that the typical contraction of the slipstream be- 6 Test Results for the Powered Airframe
hind the propeller disc does not happen due to
the presence of the body blockage. Instead, the To verify the results, powered tests were per-
slipstream follows the contour of the body. To formed using the half- scale wind tunnel model.
estimate the affected area of the BWB this data It was powered by a 550W motor driving a
was combined with some flow visualisation done 10 inch propeller with two blades. To achieve
on the un-powered model in the wind tunnel be- reasonably similar conditions, the test airspeeds
fore. It was assumed that the slipstream follows were scaled by l 0.5 and the power was scaled
the contour of the body up to the impact with the as l 3.5 , from 5000W on the full scale aircraft to
wing as shown in the top half of Figure 12 in blue. 450W. The data is plotted in Figure 13, scaled
Over the wing it would then align with the free to the experiment speeds. To start with, it was
stream. This distribution results in 12 strips, or investigated if the unpowered, windmilling pro-
1.9 times the prop diameter, being affected by the peller had any influence on the NP (green). It can
slipstream and hence the blade element results be seen that at low speed the effect is negligible,
were interpolated over these 12 strips as shown but at higher airspeeds there is a small shift for-
in Figure 12. ward.

9
 KAI LEHMKUEHLER, KC WONG AND DRIES VERSTRAETE

The results of the powered experiment are

plotted in black. They match the computations
(cyan) well around the stall speed (14% differ-
ence in NP shift) but diverge at high speeds. Here
the real propeller is still generating thrust while
the blade element code shows windmilling from
18m/s. This is caused by inaccuracies in the
propulsion model, which amongst others ignores
the effects of the body blockage and changes
to the flow direction through the propeller disc.
Improvements on the modelling of these effects
should increase the accuracy of the simulation,
but this was impractical for the simplistic ap-
proach taken.
The assumed flow field over the aircraft was
investigated on the model with tufts and a rake
tracing the propeller tip vortex. The result is
shown in Figure 14 with the blue string and has
Fig. 14 Prop wash boundary as determined in the
been indicated on Figure 12 in the lower half.
wind tunnel for a 10 inch propeller
The stream tube right behind the prop contracts
the usual way contrary to the assumption. The
highly tapered body does not produce enough
blockage to match the results from [11], which success of the first flight and will be tested on
used a blunter body. Further down the the flow future versions of the aircraft with different body
aligns with the body contour as expected and then shapes to explore its versatility.
it curves in over the wing leading edge. From
10% chord the slipstream is aligned with the free 7 Conclusion and Future Work
stream to the trailing edge. The measured dis-
tance from the centreline is 190mm, which trans- This paper presented a design and testing of
lates into 10 strips or 1.5 times the propeller di- a blended wing body UAV airframe. The de-
ameter on the PanAir model in Figure 12. There- sign methodology using fast panel methods has
fore, the affected portion of the airframe was been proven viable for an unusual configuration.
slightly overestimated. A calculation with 10 The wind tunnel tests matched the predicted data
strips is shown in red in Figure 13. The NP shift well and the flight testing revealed good handling
becomes more severe at low speeds as the slip- qualities in flight. Some problems during take
stream is concentrated over the inboard parts of off and landing due to the limited aircraft stabil-
the BWB. This means that the propulsion model ity and the presence of propulsion effects on the
produces too much thrust at these low speeds, longitudinal stability remain. The method used
which will be caused by the simplifications men- to obtain an engineering estimate of these effects
tioned above. Again, a better model should im- has been proven usable.
prove the accuracy. Future development of the airframe will fo-
The presented method shows a simplified, but cus on improving the induced drag properties and
fast way of determining the propulsion effect on the remaining stability issues. A full flight instru-
this BWB airframe. It was very helpful under- mentation system is currently being developed
standing the effect and it is conservative as it to perform flight testing for parameter estimation
over-predicts the effect by a reasonable amount. purposes.
The results of the method were crucial for the

10
 Blended Wing Body UAV

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7.1 Copyright Statement

The authors confirm that they, and/or their company or

organization, hold copyright on all of the original ma-
terial included in this paper. The authors also confirm
that they have obtained permission, from the copy-
right holder of any third party material included in this
paper, to publish it as part of their paper. The authors
confirm that they give permission, or have obtained
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