Design Guidelines of Rotary Wings in Hover for Insect-Scale Micro Air Vehicle Applications

For rotary-winged micro air vehicles, it is required to allocate a reasonable mass to a vehicle under a restriction of a rotary blade area. To enhance a mass allocatable to the vehicle, it is required to enhance rotor efficiency. Employing the figure of merit as a rotor efficiency, we propose a set of design guidelines for efficient rotor blade configurations based on the aerodynamic force measurement of various blade configurations in hovering mode at the insect-scale low Reynolds numbers ranging from 2000 to 8000. Furthermore, as one example of a blade configuration in accord with the proposed design guidelines, a unique blade configuration mimicking a wing section of a real dragonfly is proposed and its aerodynamic performance is verified experimentally.