Abstract An experimental campaign has been conducted at the Italian Aerospace Research Center to quantify the interactional effects caused by rotor-rotor interaction on a commercially available µ UAV platform. Aerodynamic and aeroacoustic measurements have been carried out for different configurations: data obtained for the isolated rotor, i.e. the baseline configuration, has been compared to the quadcopter configuration. Additionally, the quadcopter with a single operating rotor has been tested to isolate the effects of the quadcopter’s supporting arms. As expected, the aerodynamic performance of the quadcopter configuration is worse than the baseline configuration, although by a small margin, with the quadcopter exhibiting a 5% reduction in the overall thrust coefficient. The presence of the quadcopter’s support arms also degraded the acoustic field, causing the single rotor configuration to be more annoying to listeners across all azimuth angles.
Longobardo et al. (Tue,) studied this question.