Multifidelity Rotor Wake Modeling with Uncertainty Quantification of Transitioning Tilt-Propeller Aircraft Performance

What is it about?

The aircraft design process begins at conceptual design, where the general layout of an aircraft configuration has traditionally been largely determined using simplified models of aerodynamic performance for tractable exploration of the full design space. As the design matures, engineering efforts shift toward proving out the aerodynamic performance, which can be used for simulating flight envelope performance, analyzing failure cases, and integrating with control laws. In these later stages, more advanced aerodynamic solvers are used to provide more accuracy, but at significant computational cost. Using multi-fidelity approaches, an aerodynamic model that inherits the low computational cost of simpler models, while incorporating the high accuracy from more advanced models, enables efficient use of data for real-time simulation, failure analysis, or control law development. Additionally, being able to quantify the uncertainty in model outputs can help identify where further engineering effort should be placed. We demonstrate a framework that starts with quantifying the uncertainty in the different aerodynamic models, before leveraging the multi-fidelity approach. This framework is applied to a distributed electric propeller aircraft, with a focus on accurately capturing the aircraft performance as the propellers are tilted during maneuvers between vertical and forward flight. The application of such an approach to earlier design stages is also discussed, highlighting several design considerations motivated by the results in the paper.

Featured Image