Taiwanese Institute of Knowledge Innovation ( TIKI )

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAV) are beginning to dominate the area of intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (ISTAR) in forward operating battlefield scenarios. Of particular interest are vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) variants. Within this category co-axial rotor designs have been adopted due to their inherent advantages of size and power to weight ratio. The inter-rotor spacing attribute of a co-axial rotor system appears to offer insight into the optimum design characteristic. The H/D ratio has been cited as a significant factor in many research papers, but to date has lacked an empirical value or an optimal dimensionless condition. In this paper the H/D ratio of a SUAV has been explored thoroughly, reviewing the performance of these systems at incremental stages, the findings from this study have shown that a range of H/D ratios in the region of (0.41-0.65) is advantageous in the performance of SUAV systems. This finding lends itself to the theory of inter-rotor spacing as a non-dimensionally similar figure, which cannot be applied across a spectrum of systems; this could be attributed to the viscous losses of flight at low Reynolds Numbers (< 50,000).