Aerodynamic Performance of a Biplane Micro Air Vehicle

Abstract

The present paper addresses the problem of improving the aerodynamic performance of a fixed-wing micro air vehicle under stringent maximum size constraints. Monoplane wing planforms are compared with biplane concepts using low-speed wind-tunnel measurements and numerical calculations including viscous effects. A parametric study of the effect of various geometrical parameters such as aspect ratio, gap, stagger, and wing planforms has been carried out in order to optimize a biplane micro air vehicle configuration in the low-Reynolds regime. Finally, wind-tunnel measurements including the influence of propellers indicate that biplane micro air vehicle configurations can drastically increase the overall aerodynamic performance over the classical monoplane fixed-wing concept.