Ground/Wall Effects on a Ducted Fan for Control Applications of Highly Manoeuvrable VTOLs Operating in Confined Spaces

The increasing potential applications of unconventional VTOLs, using tilted ducted fans as flight control in confined spaces, provides the motivations for numerous research to focus on developing new design and control mechanisms suitable for the required manoeuvres. This thesis addresses an important factor that needs to be considered for designing an effective control system for indoor flights: the influence of proximity to solid boundaries on the performance of the ducted fans. CFD simulations were performed for a number of configurations of the fan-ground-wall and the results were used to develop a simple and quick model which can be used for real time VTOL aircraft control. The proposed model, compared to other models described in the literature, which require the same level of computational work, captures the trends of the changes more accurately. The model is capable to predict the environmental effects on the tilting fans in the configurations that they can get in the newly developed unconventional UAVs such as the proximity to a wall and tilting in ground/wall effects.