Experimental comparison of power requirements for fixed-, flapping-, and rotary-wing micro air vehicles

Despite the recent popularity of small unmanned aircraft and the recent surge in research into micro-air vehicle (MAV) aerodynamics, there is still only a small set of experimental data available for design methodology validation for vehicles with chord Reynolds numbers below 30,000. This is especially true for rotary-and flapping-wing vehicles, which are of growing interest as technological advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems (mems) and battery chemistry allow increasingly smaller flight vehicles to be realized. To address this lack of validation data, several flight vehicles with masses as low as 600mg were fabricated to investigate the power requirements and explore other hurdles which must be overcome for the successful fabrication of very small aircraft of differing configurations. In addition, flight performance results are compared to several existing analytical methods commonly used for larger aircraft to explore the feasibility of designing low Reynolds-number aircraft using current methodologies.