In the recent times ultralight drones development became very excessive and innovative market. Despite that fact the development itself should be very reliable and rapid due to possibility of fast prototyping and short lifecycle. In most cases engineers can’t simulate problem longer than the certain design need to be brought to reality. In our work we have developed a code that implemented well known blade element theory to calculate rotor characteristics for the reasonable time. To validate our computational results we have used data of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Applied Aerodynamics group’s database.
In our implementation of the blade element theory we considered an inductive velocity as it was developed in the classical works of the russian aerodynamicist B.N. Juriev.
We used the XFOIL software to calculate airfoil characteristics in wide range of the Reynolds numbers.After the validation tests, the developed python script for the rotor simulations was coupled with open-source optimization toolkit DAKOTA. The results of the optimization of the different rotors are also presented.