Wind Tunnel Testing Techniques for a Tandem Tilt-Wing, Distributed Electric Propulsion VTOL Aircraft

Busan, Ronald C.; Murphy, Patrick C.; Hatke, David B.; Simmons, Benjamin M.

doi:10.2514/6.2021-1189

Cited by 22 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Ref. [27] describes wind tunnel testing techniques for the LA-8, a tilt wing eVTOL aircraft with eight rotors. Pros and cons of one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) and design of experiments (DOE) approaches are shown, and a method of combining the two approaches is also explained.…”

Section: B Suas Wind Tunnel Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wind Tunnel Testing and Aerodynamic Characterization of a QuadPlane Uncrewed Aircraft System

Mathur¹,

Atkins²

2023

Preprint

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Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles will open new opportunities in aviation. This paper describes the design and wind tunnel analysis of an eVTOL uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) prototype with a traditional aircraft wing, tail, and puller motor along with four vertical thrust pusher motors. Vehicle design and construction are summarized. Dynamic thrust from propulsion modules is experimentally determined at different airspeeds over a large sweep of propeller angles of attack. Wind tunnel tests with the vehicle prototype cover a suite of hover, transition and cruise flight conditions. Net aerodynamic forces and moments are distinctly computed and compared for plane, quadrotor and hybrid flight modes. Coefficient-based models are developed. Polynomial curve fits accurately capture observed data over all test configurations. To our knowledge, the presented wind tunnel experimental analysis for a multi-mode eVTOL platform is novel. Increased drag and reduced dynamic thrust likely due to flow interactions will be important to address in future designs.

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Section: B Suas Wind Tunnel Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wind Tunnel Testing and Aerodynamic Characterization of a QuadPlane Uncrewed Aircraft System

Mathur¹,

Atkins²

2023

Preprint

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“…On fixed-wing aircraft, exploiting aerodynamic effects for passive stability or utilizing actuator redundancy for failure adaptation are the possible ways to achieve faulttolerance [12]. As for the hybrid VTOL UAVs, although the existing works addressed the aerodynamic performance [13], design [14], [15], modeling [16] and control [17], [18], faulttolerance is less explored. Due to the hybrid configuration design, VTOLs have configuration redundancy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design, Modeling and Control for a Tilt-rotor VTOL UAV in the Presence of Actuator Failure

Mousaei¹,

Geng²,

Keipour³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Enabling vertical take-off and landing while providing the ability to fly long ranges opens the door to a wide range of new real-world aircraft applications while improving many existing tasks. Tiltrotor vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a better choice than fixed-wing and multirotor aircraft for such applications. Prior works on these aircraft have addressed the aerodynamic performance, design, modeling, and control. However, a less explored area is the study of their potential fault tolerance due to their inherent redundancy, which allows them to tolerate some degree of actuation failure. This paper introduces tolerance to several types of actuator failures in a tiltrotor VTOL aircraft. We discuss the design and modeling of a custom tiltrotor VTOL UAV, which is a combination of a fixed-wing aircraft and a quadrotor with tilting rotors, where the four propellers can be rotated individually. Then, we analyze the feasible wrench space the vehicle can generate and design the dynamic control allocation so that the system can adapt to actuator failures, benefiting from the configuration redundancy. The proposed approach is lightweight and is implemented as an extension to an already-existing flight control stack. Extensive experiments validate that the system can maintain the controlled flight under different actuator failures. This work is the first study of the tiltrotor VTOL's fault-tolerance that exploits the configuration redundancy to the best of our knowledge.

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“…On the other hand, electric propulsion technology provides incredible new degrees of freedom in UAV system integration to achieve unprecedented collaborative coupling of aerodynamics, propulsion, control, and structure [3]. The unique feature of electric propulsion is that the technology is almost scale-free, allowing small motors to be paralleled for fail safe redundancy or distributed on the fuselage without significant effect on efficiency or specific weight [4][5][6][7]. Because of this separation between power and propulsion, efficient, compact motor and transmission systems are now available, enabling many different revolutionary UAV configurations [8][9][10][11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation and Comparison of Hybrid Wing VTOL UAV with Four Different Electric Propulsion Systems

et al. 2021

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Electric propulsion technology has attracted much attention in the aviation industry at present. It has the advantages of environmental protection, safety, low noise, and high design freedom. An important research branch of electric propulsion aircraft is electric vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, which is expected to play an important role in urban traffic in the future. Limited by battery energy density, all electric unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are unable to meet the longer voyage. Series/parallel hybrid-electric propulsion and turboelectric propulsion are considered to be applied to VTOL UAVs to improve performances. In this paper, the potential of these four configurations of electric propulsion systems for small VTOL UAVs are evaluated and compared. The main purpose is to analyze the maximum takeoff mass and fuel consumption of VTOL UAVs with different propulsion systems that meet the same performance requirements and designed mission profiles. The differences and advantages of the four types propulsion VTOL UAV in the maximum takeoff mass and fuel consumption are obtained, which provides a basis for the design and configuration selection of VTOL UAV propulsion system.

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Wind Tunnel Testing Techniques for a Tandem Tilt-Wing, Distributed Electric Propulsion VTOL Aircraft

Cited by 22 publications

References 9 publications

Wind Tunnel Testing and Aerodynamic Characterization of a QuadPlane Uncrewed Aircraft System

Wind Tunnel Testing and Aerodynamic Characterization of a QuadPlane Uncrewed Aircraft System

Design, Modeling and Control for a Tilt-rotor VTOL UAV in the Presence of Actuator Failure

Evaluation and Comparison of Hybrid Wing VTOL UAV with Four Different Electric Propulsion Systems

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