Longitudinal control of transition to powered flight for a parachute-dropped multirotor

Opazo, Tomas I.; Langelaan, Jack W.

doi:10.2514/6.2020-2072

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…New studies delving further into the analysis of these vehicles range topics covering comprehensive and CFD analyses, handling qualities, system design, hazard analysis, and wind-tunnel testing [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. Of particular interest to this work are recent studies of mid-air deployment and high rates of descent with these vehicles [48][49][50][51][52]. Some works have also looked at improving the design approach specifically for coaxial and octocopter configurations [53,54].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rotor Performance Predictions for Urban Air Mobility: Single vs. Coaxial Rigid Rotors

Cornelius,

Schmitz,

Palacios

et al. 2024

Aerospace

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This work details the development and validation of a methodology for high-resolution rotor models used in hybrid Blade Element Momentum Theory Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stokes (BEMT-URANS) CFD. The methodology is shown to accurately predict single and coaxial rotor performance in a fraction of the time required by conventional CFD methods. The methodology has three key features: (1) a high-resolution BEMT rotor model enabling large reductions in grid size, (2) a discretized set of momentum sources to interface between the BEMT rotor model and the structured URANS flow solver, and (3) leveraging of the first two features to enable highly parallelized GPU-accelerated multirotor CFD simulations. The hybrid approach retains high-fidelity rotor inflow, wake propagation, and rotor–rotor interactional effects at a several orders of magnitude lower computational cost compared to conventional blade-resolved CFD while retaining high accuracy on steady rotor performance metrics. Rotor performance predictions of thrust and torque for both single and coaxial rotor configurations are compared to test the data that the authors obtained at the NASA Langley 14- by 22-ft. Subsonic Tunnel Facility. Simulations were run with both fully turbulent and free-transition airfoil performance tables to quantify the associated uncertainty. Single rotor thrust and torque were predicted on average within 4%. Coaxial thrust and power were predicted within an average of 5%. A vortex ring state (VRS) shielding phenomenon for coaxial rotor systems is also presented and discussed. The results support that this hybrid BEMT-URANS CFD methodology can be highly parallelized on GPU machines to obtain accurate rotor performance predictions across the full spectrum of possible UAM flight conditions in a fraction of the time required by conventional higher-fidelity methods. This strategy can be used to rapidly create look-up tables with hundreds to thousands of flight conditions using a three-dimensional multirotor CFD for UAM.

show abstract