First journal paper published

While fixed, unactuated rotor tilt is increasingly utilised in commercial multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), its impact on forward flight performance remains poorly documented in the literature. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by systematically quantifying the performance trade-offs of rotor tilt across various airspeeds. Furthermore, a novel rotor configuration is proposed to mitigate some of the tilted rotor configuration’s inherent drawbacks. The different configurations are evaluated using a computationally affordable numerical approach that combines steady-state computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, a simple proportional–integral (P–I) trimming algorithm, and actuator disk rotor modelling (ADM), which has been developed during the activities in AURORA. Some of the results are also produced in collaboration with ENOLA project team: take a look at their project site at https://enola.webs.upv.es/.