Preliminary Design of a Medium Range Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Surveillance Mission

Abstract

Surveillance missions such as disaster area monitoring, volcano monitoring, border monitoring, Plant monitoring, forest burning monitoring, traffic monitoring and so on normally use full scale aircraft or helicopter controlled by a pilot and aircraft crews. Surveillance mission that use full scale aircraft has some disadvantags such as very high cost and dangerous for the pilot and crews. To minimized the disadvantages, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was developed for surveillance mission. Using UAV for surveillance mission will be cheaper and minimized the risk for the pilot and crews. To develop an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, the first step is to design the aircraft. In this research, the designed UAV has criteria: an UAV that has flight endurance for one hour, has medium cruse flight with distance of 100-150 km, cruse flight speed of 100 km/hour and  has payload of 5 kg. The designed aircraft has mission: take off, climb, cruise 1, loiter, cruise 2, descent and landing. The designed UAV configuration and technical data as: fuselage, tapered wing, twin tailboom, horizontal tail, 2 stroke engine 3.7 hp 8500 rpm with pusher propeller, length = 1.6 m, wing span = 2.1 m, wing area = 0.52 m2, wing aspect ratio = 8.48, total weigh = 9 kg. The designed UAV has parameters as drag force 1.19 N, lift force 7.68 N, coefficient of lift CL= 0.17 and coefficient of drag CD= 0.026.