I am currently designing a Simscape Multibody model of my drone. My drone is a three-armed device, which somewhat resembles the rotors of a helicopter.
The drone is supposed to rotate around itself, using a motor on each arm. Furthermore, each arm will have a wing attached to produce the lift required.
The initial purpose will be to control the RPMs of the motors as well as the pitch of the wings.
Currently I have a model without the wings, so I am looking for a way to model wings that do have some aerodynamic properties, that would be able to create some force upwards (lift) from the spinning motion.
How can I integrate wings (or other forms of artificial lift) in to my model?
You have several options:
A) Use Aerospace Blockset for ready-to-use aerodynamic forces
B) Compute your own simplified aerodynamic forces (with Simscape Physical-Signal blocks or Simulink blocks) based on relative orientation, cross-sectional area and speed of your solid wrt the air.
Both options would require sensing the relative orientation and speed of the drone, using the sensing option on the 6-DOF Joint.
Here's an example of using Simscape Multibody together with Aerospace Blockset, but for ground vehicles.
