NASA Vertical Lift Research: Addressing Aerodynamic Challenges of New Urban Air MobilityVehicles

摘要

The goal of NASA vertical lift research is to develop and validate tools, technologies and concepts to overcome keybarriers to enable the next generation of vertical lift vehicles to expand current capabilities and develop new commercialmarkets. New markets that are being developed include urban air taxi and package delivery, and a radical newclass of vertical lift vehicles that are enabled by electric propulsion are being proposed for these new markets. Thesenew vehicles include distributed electric multi-rotor and converting vehicles pose some new aerodynamic challengeswith increased rotor-rotor, rotor-airframe, and rotor-ground interactions. This presentation will describe how NASAis working to address these aerodynamic challenges by enhancing the capabilities of current computational toolsand demonstrating the use of these tools to understand the complex aerodynamic environment of radically new verticallift vehicle configurations.