Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is any flying vehicle which is not controlled by actual human pilots sitting in the cockpit but is installed with proper avionics that can either fly autonomously or by using the commands from its base. Some rotorcraft UAVs use a ducted propeller for two main reasons- safety and to increase the thrust produced by the propellers. While ducted rotors can increase the thrust produced, it also adds weight to the UAV. It was therefore hypothesized that by removing part of the duct materials (i.e. adding perforations in the duct) would benefit from both decreased duct weight and increased thrust. However, it is not clear how much trade-off would be between these two factors. Hence, the objective of this study is to explore the relationship between the change of thrust and addition of different numbers or sizes of perforations. Cases with and without duct, and duct with perforations were simulated using a commercial computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software Ansys/Fluent. The physics of the rotating propeller was modeled by a simplified disc with a pressure jump across an infinitesimal volume. Three different RPM speeds of the propellers were simulated by varying the strength of the pressure jump. The results show that the thrust decreases as the duct is added. As perforations are added, the result shows that with more perforations (i.e. more open area on the duct wall), the thrust increases accordingly until the thrust reaches a maximum value without the duct. The result is in contrast to a published experimental data stating that installation of duct can increase thrust. It is speculated that the current duct with a flat wall has caused such difference from the experimental data. Further study is recommended to continue more detailed computational simulation using a duct with cambered airfoil configuration to reduce the aerodynamic losses.

A two-dimensional viscous-inviscid interactive boundary layer method is applied to three dimensional problems of flow around ducts and ducted propellers. The idea is to predict the effects of fluid viscosity on three dimensional geometries, like ducts, using a two-dimensional boundary layer solver to avoid solving the fully three dimensional boundary layer equations, assuming that the flow is two-dimensional on individual sections of the geometry. The viscous-inviscid interactive method couples a perturbation potential based inviscid panel method with a two-dimensional viscous boundary layer solver using the wall transpiration model. The boundary layer solver used in the study solves for the integral boundary layer characteristics given the edge velocity distribution on the geometry. The viscous-inviscid coupling is applied in a stripwise manner but by including the interaction e ffects from other strips. An important development in this thesis is the consideration of eff ects of other strips in a more rational and accurate manner, leading to improved results in the cases examined when compared to the results of a previous method. In particular, the effects of potentials due to other strips arising out of the three dimensional formulation are considered in this thesis. The validity of assuming two-dimensional flow along individual sections for application of viscous-inviscid coupling is investigated for the case of an open propeller by calculating the boundary layer characteristics in the direction normal to the assumed direction of two-dimensional flow from data obtained by RANS simulations. Also, a previous method which models the flow around the trailing edge of blunt hydrofoils has been improved and extended to three dimensional axisymmetric ducts. This method is applied to ducts with blunt and sharp trailing edges and to a ducted propeller. Correlations of results with experiments and simulations from RANS are shown. / text