01 - Aircraft Design and Integrated Systems
DEVELOPMENT AND PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF OPTIMIZED ELECTRIC FIXED-WING VTOL UAV CONFIGURATIONS
P. Stahl¹, T. Seren¹, C. Rößler¹, M. Hornung¹; ¹Technical University of Munich, Germany
Fixed-wing VTOL UAV are unmanned aerial vehicles capable of both hover and efficient fast forward flight. The many existing types of fixed-wing VTOL aircraft raise the question which of these configurations is best suited for a certain mission. Therefore, an aircraft design and mission analysis tool was implemented and used to optimize every investigated configuration for the reference mission. Besides widely used fixed-wing VTOL configurations also self-developed ones are presented and included. As a test case, a comparison was performed for fixed-wing VTOL UAV in the 5 kg class. The cruise endurance ranges from 50 to 71 min among the investigated configurations.