Aerodynamics · Software
A wing that blows its own flap
I'm designing an internally blown Coandă flap that can be retrofitted to a fixed-wing, hydrogen fuel-cell UAV. The aim is to cut its ground roll from roughly 100 m to under 10 m. To get there I built a fully scripted CFD pipeline and used it to run a 98-case flap study. Wind-tunnel validation comes next.
- When
- 2026 – 2027
- Role
- MEng researcher · supervised by Dr A. Venter and Dr R. Heise
- Tools
- ANSYS Fluent, PyFluent, Gmsh, Python, AeroSandbox, OpenVSP, XFLR5, XFOIL
The problem
Short runways rule a lot of fixed-wing UAVs out of real missions. A typical take-off roll for the aircraft in this study is around 100 m. Blowing a thin jet of air over a curved flap surface keeps the flow attached far past the point where it would normally separate. That’s the Coandă effect, and it buys a lot of extra lift at low speed.