Propulsion Integration Project, design and analysis of compact UAV ducts

The Propulsion Integration Project at FOI has focused on compact and highly offset ducts, typically used on UAV platforms with high demands on low signature. Several aspects of this challenge have been addressed in various work packages. This paper deals with the aerodynamic analysis of short and aggressive ducts including the effect of lips and fuselage interference. Several ducts were designed and evaluated with the FOI developed flow solver Edge. One duct design was selected for further analysis and integration into an airframe. The computational results were compared with both a static rig test as well as a complete inlet system including forebody in FOI´s transonic wind tunnel T1500.