A Comprehensive Analysis of Various Airfoils for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/Micro Aerial Vehicles Application

The purpose of this study is to analyze different airfoils using various tools like X-Foil and Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis (ANSYS Fluent) and compare both the results with wind tunnel experimental data to choose an aerodynamically efficient airfoil, which is suitable for an unmanned aerial vehicle/micro aerial vehicle (UAV/MAV) and its operational domain of Reynolds number. The main objective of this analysis is to identify and give us an understanding of the airfoil that has a higher value of C_{l max} and minimum possible value of C_d. This article discusses various low Reynolds number airfoils, i.e., for the range of Reynolds number between 50,000 and 200,000, which is mostly used for MAVs. Also, between the range of 100,000 and 200,000 for UAVs, which have displayed considerable performance in the past. The article also presents an effort to understand the phenomenon of laminar separation bubbles.