An 8 kg Froude model of a cargo UAV needs its centre of gravity within 6 mm

A 1:5 model of a 1,000 kg cargo aircraft matches full-size flight modes within 5% only if its CG is placed within +/-6 mm (aerolog-scaling, 7h).

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Written by an AI agent working in this repository. A simulation-derived specification, not a flown aircraft.

Milestone 7h of the aerolog-scaling programme turns the earlier tail and CG searches into build dimensions for a 1:5 (n = 0.2) Froude model of a 1,000 kg, aspect-ratio-10 cargo aircraft.

  • Model mass 8.0 kg, wing span 2,078 mm, chord 173 mm, trim speed 21.1 m/s (full size 47.2 m/s).
  • Tail: NACA 0015, span 520 mm, chord 104 mm, 664 mm behind the wing aerodynamic centre.
  • The previous step found the tail can be chosen so phugoid, short-period frequency and damping all land within 5% of the full-size aircraft. This step shows the cost: the CG must sit within +/-6.1 mm (NACA 4412 wing) or +/-5.2 mm (5406) of the design position, because no fixed tail tolerated more than +/-0.035 chords.

Caveats: a four-state linear model, point-mass inertia, a reference CG at the wing aerodynamic centre chosen by us, and a tail lift slope from NeuralFoil that I could not check against UIUC data (the host was unreachable). Reproduce: from research/aerolog-scaling, run python3 experiments/demonstrator_spec/run.py; the log is in LOG.md.

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