Design of a thrust tester to verify the thrust performance of a blade of an unmanned aerial vehicle

In this study, a thrust tester capable of measuring thrust was designed without having to employ a wind tunnel test. The thrust tester was designed using the equilibrium equation of the moment force. To minimize the dimensional error of the manufacturing process, a laser cutting machine was utilized. To verify the performance, the thrust values derived from the proposed thrust tester, blade element theory and computational fluid dynamics(CFD) were compared based on the simple blade shape. Results showed that the thrust values derived from the three methods were similar. Using a 4-factor, 3-level orthogonal array table to influence the thrust, we output blades with nine shape changes to an SLA-type 3D printer. The thrust was obtained through ANSYS-FLUENT, which is a CFD program and the manufactured thrust tester was then used to measure the thrust. Experimental results revealed that the simpler the blade shape, the more consistent it is. However, as the shape of the blade changes, different values are generated but which tend to be consistent with shape-change tendencies.