The honest truth is, for a sizeable majority of UAV development projects, you don’t need CFD.
Specifically, you don’t need high-fidelity, computationally-intensive 3D viscous analysis software.
And when you get to the point where you do genuinely need it for your program, I’m willing to bet you’ll have the resources to make getting that capability much less onerous.
I’m sometimes concerned that folks in this industry without much dedicated aerodynamics or flight sciences training think aero design can only be done with expensive CFD software. Or if you’re not using that software, you’re not building a “real airplane” or doing “real engineering.”
Maybe I’m just imagining that. But I think it’s still worth saying. You don’t need CFD to do “real” aero engineering on UAVs, and that’s a very good thing.
Especially if we’re talking about low-speed platforms (flying under 100 miles per hour) the bulk of the airframes I’ve gotten to work with were initially designed and tested without any CFD. All they really needed was a 3D panel code and maybe some airfoil analysis software. This includes conventional configurations, but also some pretty unique aircraft geometries.
CFD analysis was eventually used on some of those programs. But it was to help optimize later on in the program. Those airplanes still initially got off the ground (literally) without it.
And the handful that did use CFD in development had a clear reason to: they used a jet engine for the powerplant, or flew fast enough that the physics of higher Mach numbers started to matter. And in those cases, because those UAVs were doing more advanced things, the program already had the funds and personnel for the higher-fidelity analysis needed.
Think of this email as a call to action, or a permission slip—whatever your team needs.
You can make awesome vehicles with freely-available tools, handbook recommendations, and engineering smarts. You don’t need CFD to start.
And if you’ve got a unique problem to solve and you’re not sure if you do need CFD? Shoot me a message—let’s see if I can help you think it through.