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Mechanical Engineering Commons

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Faculty Publications

2022

CFD

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering

Effects Of Rotor-Airframe Interaction On The Aeromechanics And Wake Of A Quadcopter In Forward Flight, Denis-Gabriel Caprace, Andrew Ning, Philippe Chatelain, Grégoire Winckelmans Sep 2022

Effects Of Rotor-Airframe Interaction On The Aeromechanics And Wake Of A Quadcopter In Forward Flight, Denis-Gabriel Caprace, Andrew Ning, Philippe Chatelain, Grégoire Winckelmans

Faculty Publications

From small drones to large Urban Air Mobility vehicles, the market of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft is currently booming. Modern VTOL designs feature a variety of configurations involving rotors, lifting surfaces and bluff bodies. The resulting aerodynamics are highly impacted by the interactions between those components and their wakes. This has consequences on the aircraft performance and on the downstream wake. Studying the effects of those interactions through CFD can inform the development of cheaper numerical models. In this work, we focus on the interaction between rotors and bluff bodies based on the example of a generic quadcopter …


Flowunsteady: An Interactional Aerodynamics Solver For Multirotor Aircraft And Wind Energy, Eduardo Alvarez, Judd Mehr, Andrew Ning Jun 2022

Flowunsteady: An Interactional Aerodynamics Solver For Multirotor Aircraft And Wind Energy, Eduardo Alvarez, Judd Mehr, Andrew Ning

Faculty Publications

The ability to accurately and rapidly assess unsteady interactional aerodynamics is a shortcoming and bottleneck in the design of various next-generation aerospace systems: from electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to airborne wind energy (AWE) and wind farms. In this study, we present a meshless CFD framework based on the reformulated vortex particle method (rVPM) for the analysis of complex interactional aerodynamics. The rVPM is a large eddy simulation (LES) solving the Navier-Stokes equations in their vorticity form. It uses a meshless Lagrangian scheme, which not only avoids the hurdles of mesh generation, but it also conserves the vortical …


Incorporating High-Fidelity Aerostructural Analyses In Wind Turbine Rotor Optimization, Denis-Gabriel Caprace, Adam Cardoza, Andrew Ning, Marco Mangano, Sicheng He, Joaquim R. R. A. Martins Jan 2022

Incorporating High-Fidelity Aerostructural Analyses In Wind Turbine Rotor Optimization, Denis-Gabriel Caprace, Adam Cardoza, Andrew Ning, Marco Mangano, Sicheng He, Joaquim R. R. A. Martins

Faculty Publications

s demand grows for wind turbines with larger blades, the design of future wind turbines must account for multi-physical interactions and an ever-increasing number of design load conditions. One aspect, aerostructural coupling, calls for design tools that are both accurate and computationally efficient. In this paper, we present a combined-fidelity approach that couples high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics and computational solid mechanics simulations, with a conventional aeroelastic turbine modeling tool based on blade element momentum and beam theories. The approach is integrated into a multidisciplinary optimization framework. It takes advantage of the high-fidelity tightly-coupled aerostructural simulations to evaluate the rotor power …