Colloquia

Summary

Electric motor and battery technologies have advanced to the point where electric aircraft with a payload in the order of hundreds of kilograms start to become viable. Compared to gas turbine engines, the efficiency of electric motors is less dependent on the size of the power unit. This offers a higher degree of freedom for the layout of an electric aircraft concept. To quickly discard preliminary design concepts with low potential and focus on concepts with promising  performance characteristics, it is highly desirable to have medium-fidelity analysis tools that can relatively quickly assess the viability of a broad range of different configurations. In a later stage of the design process only the most viable design(s) will then need to be analysed in detail with (expensive) high-fidelty computational and/or experimental methods.  The current work focusses on the aerodynamic interference between propellers and wings. This interference will be studied using the panel method in VSPAero, a potential flow solver that is part of the OpenVSP software suite.

For the isolated propeller or wing, it was possible to obtain results that agreed reasonably well with literature, though some clear shortcomings in the solver were observed. While some of these shortcomings were expected due to the assumptions and simplifications underlying the governing equations, there were a few limitations with unclear causes as well. When the combined geometry was simulated, it was found that while the results for the propeller were plausible, the results for the wing were sometimes highly irregular, casting significant doubt on the accuracy of the propeller results as well due to the two-way interaction between the geometries.