Page 309 - AWSAR 2.0

Techniques Based on Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection for Designing Wing Geometries for Micro-Air Vehicle Applications
Mr. Pranesh Chandrasekaran*
Email: pranesh.9790@gmail.com
Mr. Nettimi Satya Sai Srinivas || 285
The growing need for small-scale flying machines for a variety of civilian and military applications has resulted in an extensive research on Micro-Air Vehicles (MAV). My interest towards MAVs (aka drones) began when I and my peer group chose to build and fly a remote controlled airplane model for our group project during my master’s programme. This project provided me an opportunity to develop a passion towards aerodynamics a branch of science that deals with the study of motion of air, with special attention dedicated to the flow of air over an airplane wing. The mere experience of building an in-house airplane model, which actually flew, motivated me to formulate a research problem for my individual project under the same field of research. Here, I got myself introduced to Computational Fluid
Dynamics (CFD) techniques, which allow one to simulate the flow around any arbitrarily shaped bodies by numerically solving the governing equations of fluid flow the Navier- Stokes (N-S) equations. Little did I know that I would be bestowed with a silver medal for the best thesis work and that I would be using these tools for solving my doctoral research problem!
A careful review of existing MAV designs revealed that majority of these vehicles do not achieve a flying time of even 30 minutes. Many causes can be attributed to this, perhaps the fundamental barrier that limits the performance of MAV is the poor aerodynamic efficiency of their wing surface. Quantification of aerodynamic efficiency requires a basic understanding of the fundamental forces
* Mr. Pranesh Chandrasekaran, PhD Scholar from M. S. Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, Karnataka, is pursuing his research on “Aerodynamic Shape Optimisation of Fixed Wings at Low Reynolds Numbers with Flow Transition for Micro-Air Vehicle Applications”. His popular science story entitled “Techniques Based on Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection for Designing Wing Geometries for Micro-Air Vehicle Applications” has been selected for AWSAR Award.