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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 127 records · Page 7
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Multi-Fidelity Computational Analysis of a Quiet Single-Main Rotor Helicopter for Air Taxi Operations

A multi-fidelity computational study has been conducted on NASA’s quiet single-main rotor helicopter concept for urban air mobility using computational fluid dynamics and rotorcraft comprehensive analysis tools. Two approaches have been followed in order to simulate the rotor flows: (1) a rotor disk model, which models the rotors as source terms, and (2) a high-fidelity approach using high-order accurate schemes and dual-time stepping, which simulates the rotor with its individual rotating blade grids. The delayed detached-eddy simulation model has been employed. A loose-coupling approach between the flow solver and a rotorcraft comprehensive code is utilized to include vehicle trim and motion variables. The quiet single-main rotor helicopter is one of the conceptual designs intended to focus and guide NASA’s research activities in support of aircraft development for vertical take-off and landing air taxi operations.

RVLT↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Computational Aerodynamics Study of the Lift+Cruise VTOL Concept Vehicle Components

This paper describes a building-block approach for high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic simulations of NASA’s Lift+Cruise (L+C) Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) concept vehicle. The Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations are solved on overset structured grids using OVERFLOW. For these analyses, overset meshes are generated using recently developed automated meshing tools. A baseline study is initially performed on the vehicle fuselage with wings and tails. Vehicle components such as pylons and gears are then added individually and together to study incremental component aerodynamic effects. The results from this study are also used to demonstrate the capabilities of the automatic meshing tools for performing rapid computational analyses.

RVLT↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Conceptual Design Trade Studies for Acoustic Predictions of the NASA UAM Tiltrotor Reference Vehicle

A toolchain of low-and mid-fidelity tools is applied to NASA’s Urban Air Mobility tiltrotor reference vehicle to quantify trades in sizing, performance, and noise at the conceptual design level. The process includes conceptual sizing, comprehensive analysis, and acoustic analysis to design and analyze versions of the concept tiltrotor with differing design variables. Rotor tip speed is the primary design variable studied, with blade twist, blade taper, and blade number also considered. The noise metrics used are the FAA/EASA certification Effective Perceived Noise Levels for takeoff, flyover, and approach. Certification condition noise is calculated for all conditions in both conversion and airplane flight modes, with airplane mode flight resulting in noise 10-25EPNdB quieter than conversion mode and tip speed variation providing noise reduction up to 9EPNdB.

Acoustic↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

An Overview of Nasa Research on Aam Noise and A Recent Noise and Number Study

NASA conducts psychoacoustic research on the human response to Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles as part of its Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) mission. This presentation provides an overview of NASA’s role in AAM research with an emphasis on recent work investigating people’s response to frequent UAM vehicle flyover sounds.

UAM↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Tiltwing Transition Flight Analysis Using High-Fidelity CFD

Transition from hover to forward flight and vice versa represents the most critical flight phase of tiltwing aircraft. Despite its importance to ensure a safe operation, the aerodynamics of this maneuver are not sufficiently understood. This paper focuses on the study of transition flight for NASA’s six-passenger tiltwing air taxi by means of high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations. On the basis of a static trim solution, four points within the transition corridor are analyzed: transition mode at wing tilt angles of60and44, and airplane mode at airspeeds of110 ktand155 kt. We investigate the balance of forces and moments for rotor-borne and wing-borne regimes, and how rotor-on-rotor and rotor-on-wing interactions affect performance. The simulations indicate that during the early stages of transition, the vortices remain in close proximity to the proprotors, inducing large fluctuations on the order of the mean blade loading. Additionally, the blowing and swirling effects of the proprotor wakes delay flow separation over a portion of the wing. The mid-transition conditions appear to be critical, with extensive regions of separated flow over the wing. In airplane mode, proprotor-wing slipstream effects can be exploited to enhance lift generation. The results of this paper contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex aerodynamic interactions during transition flight to enable a safer and more efficient operation of tiltwing aircraft.

ARMD↗
NASA NTRS2024

Extended Investigation into Fault-Tolerant Integrated Motor Drive for a Quadrotor Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Aircraft

Electric propulsor machines and their associated power electronics have been identified in past studies as low-reliability components in emerging Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) vehicles that raise their predicted catastrophic failure rates. This research effort extends previously presented work investigating the use of fault-tolerant (FT) motor drives in quadrotor aircraft as a promising approach to significantly increase their mean-time-to-failure (MTTF). In particular, fault-tolerant modular motor drives (FT-MMDs) are identified as strong candidates for closing the electric propulsor reliability gap. These FT-MMDs divide a machine drive into multiple redundant modules, each consisting of three phase stator windings and power electronics units, enabling continued machine operation after a module failure. Achieving the highest possible isolation between modules (physical, magnetic, thermal, electrical) is critically important in FT-MMDs to prevent the propagation of any failure between modules. Key additional requirements for achieving the highest possible reliability characteristics with FT-MMDs are high repair rates and aggressive suppression of all single-point failures.

quadrotor↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Advances in Automation of Overset Structured Volume Mesh Generation and Domain Connectivity

Automation of overset structured surface mesh generation has recently been accomplished by the creation of face, edge, and node meshes based on Boundary Representation solids as the geometry input. The current work continues the automation effort in overset volume mesh generation and domain connectivity based on the auto-generated surface meshes. All near-body curvilinear volume meshes are automatically generated using hyperbolic methods. Automation of this step is enabled by appropriate surface grid point distribution, and selection of boundary-splay and smoothing parameters based on concave and convex surface features. The off-body domain is covered by two automatically generated grid systems. The first contains a single Cartesian mesh with a uniform core enclosing all near-body volume meshes and stretched layers that extend to the far field, while the second consists of a set of small stretched Cartesian grids covering pockets of off-body orphan points. With high quality mesh overlap mostly guaranteed by the surface meshing scheme, orphan points that need to be covered by the second Cartesian mesh system are located away from the fine grid spacing region near the wall. Using line-segment and ray-pierce tests against the surface grids, hole-cutting is accomplished on both near and off-body volume grids resulting in appropriate clearances from the wall. The complete mesh generation automation process is demonstrated on five test cases where flow solutions are also computed and compared with solutions obtained using other methods.

TTT↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Comparing Methods to Extract Sectional Angle of Attack From Blade-Resolved Rotor Simulations

The angle of attack is widely used to describe the aerodynamics of rotor blades. Models based on lifting lines, actuator lines, and actuator disks use it as a primary variable, assuming the aerodynamics can be represented by the flow around a collection of equivalent 2D airfoils. This paper evaluates the accuracy of existing methods that extract the angle of attack from blade-resolved CFD simulations, towards enabling a direct comparison of angle of attack between blade-resolved and blade-modeled simulations. Results are compared for a 2D airfoil for which the angle of attack is known by definition. The hovering rotor case is also considered, where we look at two different rotor blades. We discuss the factors that impact the accuracy of the 2D predictions. For the 3D rotors, we show that three-dimensional effects in the root and tip regions lead to large discrepancies between methods. This suggests that the very definition of angle of attack is unable to accurately represent the flow in these regions. Finally, based on guidelines that we establish, we propose an alternate method that uses local velocities sampled on a contour located 0.25 chord, or less, away from the airfoil surface and generally yields improved accuracy compared to most existing techniques.

ARMD↗