TY - GEN
T1 - Rotor Performance Predictions for UAM - Single vs Coaxial Rigid Rotors
AU - Cornelius, Jason
AU - Schmitz, Sven
N1 - Funding Information:
This research effort is funded through the NASA New Frontiers Program. The authors would like to extend their gratitude to William Polzin and Rs Nappinnai of Sukra Helitek Incorporated for their continued support as well as the late Dr. Ganesh Rajagopalan for his contributions enabling increased access to the CFD analysis tool used in this work. Additionally, the authors would like to thank Witold Koning, Larry Young, Ethan Romander, and Dr. William Warmbrodt of the NASA Ames Research Center for their guidance. Lastly, a big thank you to Kirk Heller and Ben Enders at Penn State University for their assistance in developing high performance GPU computing capabilities used in this work.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2022 by the Vertical Flight Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The recent increased interest in advanced air mobility (AAM), specifically within urban air mobility (UAM) and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) applications, has created a need to better understand and be able to predict the performance of these vehicles. Various configurations of AAM platforms are constantly being proposed, but the majority of them are based on a multi-rotor system consisting of single or coaxial rotors. This work summarizes a CFD model development using a hybrid BEMT and unsteady RANS flow solver, Rotorcraft CFD, which predicts rotor performance at a fidelity suitable for engineering design in a fraction of the time required by conventional CFD methods. Single and coaxial rotor configurations are presented using two-bladed KDE 30.5” rotors and are compared to test data obtained in the NASA Langley 14- by 22- ft. Subsonic Tunnel Facility. The simulations were run with both fully-turbulent and free-transition airfoil performance tables to quantify the associated uncertainty. Simulation results comparing an isolated single rotor to a coaxial rotor system are also presented.
AB - The recent increased interest in advanced air mobility (AAM), specifically within urban air mobility (UAM) and electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) applications, has created a need to better understand and be able to predict the performance of these vehicles. Various configurations of AAM platforms are constantly being proposed, but the majority of them are based on a multi-rotor system consisting of single or coaxial rotors. This work summarizes a CFD model development using a hybrid BEMT and unsteady RANS flow solver, Rotorcraft CFD, which predicts rotor performance at a fidelity suitable for engineering design in a fraction of the time required by conventional CFD methods. Single and coaxial rotor configurations are presented using two-bladed KDE 30.5” rotors and are compared to test data obtained in the NASA Langley 14- by 22- ft. Subsonic Tunnel Facility. The simulations were run with both fully-turbulent and free-transition airfoil performance tables to quantify the associated uncertainty. Simulation results comparing an isolated single rotor to a coaxial rotor system are also presented.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85139419966
T3 - Aeromechanics for Advanced Vertical Flight Technical Meeting 2022
BT - Aeromechanics for Advanced Vertical Flight Technical Meeting 2022
PB - Vertical Flight Society
T2 - Aeromechanics for Advanced Vertical Flight Technical Meeting 2022
Y2 - 25 January 2022 through 27 January 2022
ER -