Lift and Drag Performances of O-Ring Paper Plane

Abstract

The O-ring paper plane is viewed as another option of paper planes that have potential to be upgraded as Micro Air Vehicle (MAV). Despite the complexity of the closed wing design, the O-Ring (OR) paper planes are easy to develop by following a certain origami technique. However, the aerodynamics performances for such closed wing design is still open to be explored before it can be upgraded for MAV usage. The aerodynamics complexity of closed wing design combined with various hoop sizing may induced complicated aerodynamics performance for OR paper planes. Thus, the objective of this research is to investigate the hoop diameters influence towards the aerodynamics performance of OR paper plane. Three different OR paper planes configurations known as OR-1, OR-2 and OR-3 have been used for comparative study. ANSYS-CFX simulation was fully utilized in this works to simulate the virtual wind tunnel on each OR paper planes configurations.  The comparison works have been conducted to study the distributions of C_L, C_D and C_L/C_D on the closed wing configurations. C_L results shows that OR-3 induces 16.6% better C_L magnitude compared to OR-2 and OR-1. In fact, the OR-3 and OR-2 with larger hoop size produced better C_Lmax and α_stall performances compared to smaller hoop configuration (OR-1). The C_D performance also shows that OR-3 (with larger hoop configuration) produced at least 1.4% better C_{D min} than the other configurations. However, the results show that OR-3 configurations has suffered from larger C_{D increment} with at least 2% larger C_{D increment} magnitude compared to OR-2 and OR-1. C_L/C_Dmax results exhibited that OR-3 induces the highest C_L/C_Dmax at 6.27 which is about 5.9% and 13.1% higher than OR-2 and OR-1 produced, respectively. The analysis on the low-pressure distribution area reveals that larger area of low pressure C_P found on OR-3 has been lead into better C_L magnitude for OR-3. Based on these results, one can presume that larger hoop size on OR paper planes induces higher C_L and C_L/C_D max performances due to better low-pressure C_P distributions on the wing.