Full-Scale eVTOL Aircraft Performance and Aeroacoustic Test, Evaluation, and Modeling

The recent upsurge in development and prospective applications of Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles has the potential to transform the vertical flight landscape. Among the several classes of aircraft under development for projected Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) applications are vehicles with distributed multiple-rotor systems. Such multicopters offer potential benefits in simplified flight control, redundancy, and conversion between vertical lift and forward flight. 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. Computational models exist that can analyze these vehicles, however, as identified by NASA in the Phase I solicitation, high-quality, full-scale experimental data to validate these models is not currently available. The proposed Phase II STTR effort will address this need by providing extending Phase I work, providing both a computational model and an additional body of flight test data for a full-scale multirotor eVTOL aircraft. Phase II flight testing will provide both performance and noise data that extends initial Phase I results. An ambitious work scope is proposed by leveraging the advanced state of development of models and resources available to the proposing team, including both a full-scale aircraft 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. New Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft could transform the landscape of vertical flight through greatly expanded Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) capability.  Multirotor eVTOL vehicles offer benefits in simplified flight control, redundancy, and conversion between vertical and forward flight.  However, multirotor systems pose considerable design challenges due to the effects of rotor-on-rotor and rotor-on-airframe interactions on performance, aerodynamics, vibratory loads, and noise. The high-quality, full-scale experimental test data needed to understand these effects and validate analyses is currently unavailable.  To meet this need, the proposing team will design and execute experiments on a full-scale multirotor eVTOL aircraft, generating test data for understanding and validating aerodynamic and acoustic analyses.  The collaborative effort will provide both a computational model and a greatly expanded body of flight test data for this class of multirotor aircraft, building on the initial tranche of performance data and modeling results generated in Phase I. The main goal of the Phase II effort is to provide both a computational model and a body of aerodynamic and acoustic flight test data for a full-scale multicopter eVTOL aircraft needed to understand the complex aeroacoustic characteristics of these vehicles.  Phase II activities will expand the Phase I IGE hovering flight test data for a full-scale eVTOL multicopter, to include both low speed performance and noise data.  In addition, aeroacoustic analysis and design work will be generated using a model of the test vehicle built with state-of-the-art eVTOL modeling software.  Individual technical objectives are (1) obtain additional aerodynamic flight test data in hover and low speed flight for a prototype of the Skai hexacopter, along with noise measurements (2) build computational models of the test vehicle suitable for both performance and aeroacoustic analysis to support design, and (3) perform validation calculations with the computational models.  The proposed deliverables are (1) performance and noise flight test data for a full-scale eVTOL hexacopter provided to allow NASA to share this data with other government agencies, (2) a report that describes computational results obtained during the effort and, (3) the software used to perform these predictions with sample input files, documented and provided for use by NASA personnel at NASA research centers.

The proposed research effort will provide performance, aerodynamics and acoustics flight test data and computational modeling for full-scale eVTOL AAM multicopters, directly supporting NASA’s ARMD Strategic Thrust 4: Safe, Quiet, and Affordable Vertical Lift Air Vehicles by addressing the increasing demand for knowledge about how to design, build and fly these types of vehicles.  The test data obtained in this effort helps fill a vital, missing link impeding the progress of those at NASA and in industry developing eVTOL AAM vehicles. CDI provides engineering services and software to numerous eVTOL AAM air taxi vehicle developers. The new full-scale test data will be used to validate our tools, and software enhancements produced will be instrumental in the success of this new generation of entrepreneurial organizations who have an immediate need for improved modeling and analysis it will engender.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 6) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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