Browsing by Subject "Micro air vehicles (MAV)"
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Item A computational model for flexible wing based micro air vehicles(2006-08) Ferguson, Lauren A.; Seshaiyer, Padmanabhan; Ibragimov, Akif; Aulisa, Eugenio; Smith, Philip W.Due to the complexities of the wing structure of a micro air vehicle, MAV, a computational model of the aircraft wing requires a combination of many structural elements. The wing typically consists of a flexible membrane material braced with a leading edge spar and chordwise battens. The structural model must combine the model of the membrane material together with the model of the rigid battens. Most current models treat the battens as large-density membrane elements. Ideally, the battens must be modeled as beam elements. However, using beam elements creates the need for the structural model to use coupling to combine the membrane and beam models. Therefore, we will introduce a new coupled membrane-beam solution, in which the battens are modeled using beam elements. Moreover, we plan to incorporate this structural model in a much larger fluid-structure interaction framework that may be used to model MAVs.Item Trajectory planning for micro air vehicles in the presence of wind(Texas Tech University, 2006-05) McNeely, Rachelle L.; Iyer, Ram V.; Wang, Alex; Martin, Clyde F.As a Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) maneuvers through a city, the effect of wind is important to its performance. Concerns include the MAV's size, speed, and turn radius, which cause susceptibility to wind. If an inadequate maneuvering area or strong wind conditions cause turning within the city to be impossible, one solution is to fly through the city while viewing targets and above in expedition to other targets. We concentrate on flight above the city. Fewer obstacles are present; therefore, the optimal trajectory is the minimum time solution in the presence of wind, considering a minimum turn radius constraint. We prove existence and uniqueness where a wind vector field varies with time but is spatially constant for each time instant. We also prove existence with temporally and spatially varying wind vector fields. After proving existence of one solution, provided certain conditions are satisfied, we conclude existence of the minimum time solution.