Flexible shear-stress sensor skin and its application to unmanned aerial vehicles

Shear-stress information is of great interest for many fluidic dynamic monitoring/diagnostics application. To obtain such information on non-planar surfaces has long been a significant challenge. This paper describes the development of flexible shear-stress sensor skin and its application on the detection of leading edge flow separation for delta planform unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The sensor skin contains a 1-D array of 36 shear-stress sensors, which can cover the 180degrees surface of the 1.27 cm diameter semicylindrical UAV leading edge with 5degrees resolution. The implementation process of the sensor skin is significantly simplified by a packaging scheme based on solder bonding and flexible printed circuit board (PCB). The flexible shear-stress sensor skin in both wind tunnel and real flight tests detected the flow separation along the leading edge successfully. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.