Conceptual Design Tool to Analyze Electrochemically-Powered Micro Air Vehicles

A multi-fidelity conceptual design tool was developed to assess electrochemically-powered micro air vehicles(MAVs). The tool utilizes four areas of contributing analyses (CAs): aerodynamics, propulsion, power management, and power sources to determine the endurance duration of a given mission. The low-fidelity aerodynamic CA consisted of drag polar calculations and the high-level CA used a vortex theory code called Athena Vortex Lattice (AVL). The propulsion CA employed QPROP and a MATLAB code that used experimental propeller data and motor constants to predict propeller-motor combination performance for the low- and high-fidelity tracks, respectively. The power management CA determined the percentage of required power the power sources needed to provide by a user-defined split or an optimization to maximize endurance duration for the two fidelity options. The power source CA used specific energy and specific power calculations for the low-fidelity track and polarization curves and Ragone plots for the high-fidelity track.