Effects caused by the implementation of the area rule theory to the fuselage of a surveillance unmanned aerial vehicle using computational fluid dynamics methods.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is a type of aircraft that has a very wide application. In this study, numerical calculations were performed using ANSYS Fluent software to find the effects caused by the implementation of the area rule theory to the fuselage of a surveillance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The area rule theory usually used on the transonic aircraft while the surveillance UAV is a very low speed aircraft. The study was conducted by varying four prototype of UAV fuselage with different volume distributions on the area around the wing without varying other part such as wing, tail, etc. The study was conducted using the k-omega SST viscous model (k-ω SST) with the mission profile having a distance of 200 km, a ceiling of 500 m, and a speed of 20.8333 m/s. Mesh is made of polyhedral with a very good standard of skewness quality and mesh orthogonal quality. The results of this study indicate that the implementation of the area rule theory to the fuselage of a surveillance UAV didn't affect the drag force that occur on the aircraft, but the implementation of the theory increased the lift force occur on the aircraft, although it's not significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]