Multirotor - Vortex Particle Method

The viscous vortex particle method is a mesh-free Lagrangian CFD method for the numerical solution of Navier-Stokes in their vorticity form. It’s about two orders of magnitude faster than mesh-based CFD (RANS or LES). We are exploring its potential for modeling the complicated aerodynamics interactions in eVTOL aircraft design. All codes are in-house developed at BYU’s FLOW Lab,

Slides available here

SUMMARY:

• Validation of predicted multirotor interactions in both hover and forward flight, at both low and high Reynolds numbers.
• We ran a parametric study with 1152 simulations taking ~3.5 days in a desktop computer (~4 mins per simulation).
• We built response surfaces of unsteady loading and performance drop during rotor-on-rotor interactions of the APC 10x7 propeller.

FUTURE WORK

• Coupling with noise code for prediction of acoustic interactions.
• Automatic derivatives for gradient-based design optimization.
1. Alvarez, E. J., and Ning, A., “Modeling Multirotor Aerodynamic Interactions Through the Vortex Particle Method,” AIAA Aviation Forum, Dallas, TX, Jun. 2019. doi:10.2514/6.2019-2827 [BibTeX] [DOI] [PDF]
@inproceedings{Alvarez2019,