Araştırma Makalesi

Design and Development of a Ducted-Fan UAV for Agricultural Purposes

Cilt: 2 Sayı: Aviation Technologies and Applications Conference (ATAConf'25) Special Issue 31 Aralık 2025
PDF İndir
TR EN

Design and Development of a Ducted-Fan UAV for Agricultural Purposes

Abstract

As in many military and civilian areas, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is increasing in agricultural applications. The configuration of the UAV to be used in these applications is selected by taking into consideration features such as efficiency, payload capacity, and maneuverability. This study aims to design and develop a ducted-fan UAV for agricultural applications such as plant health monitoring. Common UAV designs like the quadcopter used in agriculture often suffer from low efficiency and a high risk of damage in dense environments such as crop fields because of their open propellers. Compared to multi-rotor UAVs, ducted-fan design can protect the UAV from dense environments and increase the efficiency of the propeller. Ducted fan UAVs generally consist of a single propeller placed inside a duct and fins placed under the propeller that allow the aircraft to move in different directions by changing pitch and roll moments with respect to the center of gravity of the UAV. In the study, a special propeller and a duct are designed to meet the requirements set for the UAV design. The designed propeller and duct for the ducted-fan UAV makes the design unique and reduces the cost of the UAV. To validate the proposed propeller design, aerodynamic analysis is done in ANSYS Fluent, and the results are presented. A controller for the ducted fan UAV is designed and it is tested on a model of the UAV created in Matlab Simulink used by Simscape Toolbox. As a result of tests carried out in a simulation environment, it is observed that the designed UAV is capable of being used in agricultural applications.

Keywords

UAV , Ducted-Fan , Propeller Design , ANSYS , Simscape

Kaynakça

  1. [1] C. T. Modlin and J. J. Modlin, “The 1.5 and 1.4 ultimate factors of safety for aircraft and spacecraft: History, definition, and applications,” 2014.
  2. [2] H. Jiang and Y. Zhang, “Aerodynamic design and evaluation of a ducted fan lift system for vertical takeoff and landing flying cars,” Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part A: Journal of Power and Energy, pp. 115–125, 2023.
  3. [3] J. G. Leishman, Principles of Helicopter Aerodynamics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
  4. [4] S. Raut and A. F. Shaikh, “Plant disease detection using image processing,” International Journal of Innovative Research in Science, Tamilnadu, India, 2017.
  5. [5] J. Smith, UAV System Design Principles. New York, NY, USA: Aviation Press, 2015.
  6. [6] M. Yacoubi, A. Jlassi, J. Karoun, T. Ben Kirane, L. Bekkali, H. Jhabli, and P. Hendrick, “Design and optimization of a ducted fan VTOL MAV controlled by electric ducted fans,” in Proceedings of the 8th European Conference for Aeronautics and Aerospace Sciences (EUCASS), Brussels, Belgium, 2019.
  7. [7] Z. B. Husin and A. Y. Aziz, “Feasibility study on plant chili disease detection using image processing,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Systems Modelling and Simulation, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, pp. 291–296, 2012.
  8. [8] Z. Zhang and M. B. Liu, “Design of ducted fan based on optimal circulation distribution,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series, in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Fluid Mechanics and Industrial Applications (FMIA 2022), Taiyuan, China, 2022.
  9. [9] G. Heredia, A. Ollero, M. Bejar, and R. Mahtani, “Sensor-based control of a multirotor aerial robot,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Kobe, Japan, 2009, pp. 1–6, doi: 10.1109/ROBOT.2009.5152380.
  10. [10] A. Ji and K. Turkoglu, “Development of a low-cost experimental quadcopter testbed using an Arduino controller and software,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.04886, 2015. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.04886

Kaynak Göster

APA
Ketme, F. E. (2025). Design and Development of a Ducted-Fan UAV for Agricultural Purposes. Ege Üniversitesi Ulaştırma Yönetimi Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2(Aviation Technologies and Applications Conference (ATAConf’25) Special Issue), 85-111. https://izlik.org/JA82ZB98UY