SBIR/STTR Award attributes
The recent upsurge in development and prospective applications of Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles has the potential to transform the landscape for vertical flight.nbsp; Among the several classes of aircraft under development for projected Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) missions and activity are vehicles with distributed multiple-rotor systems.nbsp; Such multicopters offer potential benefits in simplified flight control, redundancy, and conversion between vertical lift and forward flight.nbsp; However, multirotor systems pose considerable design challenges in terms of quantifying the effect of rotor-rotor interactions on integrated performance, rotor/airframe interactional aerodynamics, flight mechanics, vibratory loads, and noise.nbsp; Computational models exist that can analyze these vehicles, however high-quality, full-scale experimental data to validate these models is not currently available.nbsp; To address this need, NASA is seeking design and execution of experiments on multrotor VTOL systems that would generate data suitable for validating aerodynamic and acoustic analyses of full-scale multicopter systems.nbsp; The proposed collaborative STTR effort will address this need by providing both a computational model and a body of aerodynamic data for a full scale multirotor eVTOL aircraft with an initial tranche of full-scale performance modeling, simulation and test data to be provided in Phase I.nbsp; An ambitious timeline is proposed by leveraging the advanced state of development of models and resources available to the proposing team, including both a full-scale multicopter that has already undergone low altitude hover flight tests and industry-standard modeling and analysis software currently in use by NASA and eVTOL AAM aircraft developers performing vehicle concept evaluation, analysis and design.
