An exploratory study of quadrotor's propellers impact using 3D gas dispersion simulator

Abstract

A truthful gas dispersion simulator is needed to compare and evaluate the algorithms of mobile gas detection robots because it is extremely difficult to reproduce the similar experiments' environment parameters in the real world. On the grounds that, some environment parameters such as wind direction and speed, humidity, and temperature are problematic to be manipulated in a real word experiment, especially in outdoor experiments. There is only few work done in gas dispersion simulator, hence there are plenty of research gaps can be filled in this area, one of them is to investigate the impact of a mobile olfactory robot's moving mechanism to the gas dispersion. As for our paper, we focus on quadrotor's propellers' airflow disturbance and its impact to gas dispersion. In this work, we present an airflow analysis test of a quadrotor by using a 3D real scale model computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software and then modelled the airflow disturbance pattern of a quadrotor into the gas dispersion simulator, which shows the interaction between the quadrotor's propellers and gas particles in the simulation.