Continuum Dynamics Inc, (CDI) has been awarded a NASA Phase I SBIR effort to develop an efficient tool-set for generating airfoil data tables to support aircraft sizing, conceptual, and preliminary design.
Despite the capabilities and usability improvements of modern CFD software, rotary-wing aircraft sizing, design, and analysis software often uses lower fidelity methods that can provide adequate accuracy in a fraction of the setup and computation time but require pre-computed 2D airfoil data tables. Even though such data tables have a long legacy of use, their generation, especially for new airfoil sections typical of modern Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) configurations, is far from routine given the need to cover 360 deg. angle of attack over a range of Mach and Reynolds numbers – with manual tuning often used to fill-in missing data or remove “questionable” points. The Phase I effort will build upon CDI associates’ decades of experience developing and using airfoil data tables for rotorcraft design and analysis to develop a software tool-set that will feature a range of methods for automatically predicting single and multi-element airfoil section performance, and assembling the desired airfoil tables from a database of predictions and experimental data, all the while providing uncertainty metrics to the user.
Dr. Glen Whitehouse is the principal investigator for this NASA Phase I effort. To learn more about CDI’s experience in rotorcraft design and analysis, please contact CDI at info@continuum-dynamics.com.