Modelling and Design of a Hybrid Aerial Vehicle Combining VTOL Capabilities with Fixed Wing Aircraft

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have garnered a lot of attention over the past few years and have become a topic of interest for researchers justified mainly by a wide range of applications, both military and civil. This paper aims to introduce a hybrid design that combines Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) capabilities with a fixed wing aircraft. The design employs a flying wing design fused with a rotor arrangement which allows it to make transition between a multirotor and fixed wing aircraft. Mathematical modeling is performed to substantiate the complete mechanism of how the transition will take place and is presented in this paper. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is also performed in order to experimentally validate the performance of proposed design and the results obtained are also presented in the paper.