Atlanta, Georgia
Multi-Disciplinary Optimization of a Blown Wing STOL Aircraft
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A team from Dr. Brian German’s lab worked on a project to optimize a STOL blown wing aircraft. I created Pointwise meshes for airfoil shape optimization, wrote my own panel code from, and helped develop a model to evaluate descent and landing performance. Finally, I helped with the construction and flight testing of a prototype STOL aircraft.
Analysis
Pointwise Meshing
I meshed multi-element airfoils in Pointwise for shape optimization in SU2. I developed meshes that are able to converge reliably even when an airfoil’s shape was perturbed for the optimization. T-rex meshing and other techniques were utilized to capture effects in and around complicated boundary layers.
Landing Performance
A code was developed in Python to trim the descent of a STOL aircraft and dynamically simulate its landing trajectory. A controller from Stevens, Johnson, and Lewis’s Aircraft Control and Simulation and ODE solvers such as RK4 were implemented.
2D Airfoil Panel Code
I wrote a 2D panel code in Python to allow for quick optimization iterations. Outputs for lift and pressure coefficients were compared to XFOIL results to validate the code. I am currently developing an integrated boundary code to calculate viscous drag.
Flight Testing
