Aeroelastic structural design to increase flight performance through gust harvesting

What is it about?

The presented work outlines a process for evaluating a known structure's aerodynamic performance while within gusts and vertically moving air. The process is used to represent the performance of the vehicle as a summation of the energy state of the vehicle while it traverses a set gust condition. The goal of this study is to increase the range or endurance of an aircraft through structural design that optimizes the energy gains, or reduction in losses, while within these vertical gusts.

Featured Image

Photo by Konrad Wojciechowski on Unsplash

Photo by Konrad Wojciechowski on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The atmosphere is always in motion resulting in vertical air motion from a variety of sources, this air motion provides a passive method to reduce the power required to fly. By quantifying the performance of a baseline aircraft future work can be done to select and optimized structure that extracts more energy from the moving air, allowing for a passive drag reduction.

Perspectives

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This work describes the foundation of the ongoing work completed by myself and other members at the Applied Aerodynamics Laboratory of Flight here at Toronto Metropolitan University. This work is especially interesting when considering its application for ultra-long endurance aircraft such as the Clean Renewable Energy Aerial Test Vehicle (CREATeV) worked on in our lab.

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