Full-Scale eVTOL Aircraft Flight Dynamics Testing, Modeling and Simulation

Electric-motor driven Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles have the potential to transform short-range VTOL flight, offering benefits in quietness, simplified flight control, redundancy, and speed. However, they also pose considerable design challenges in terms of rotor-rotor and rotor-airframe interaction effects on performance, flight dynamics, vibratory loads, and noise. Computational models under development to analyze these characteristics lack enough high-quality, full-scale flight test data for validation. To address this gap, NASA is seeking proposals for technology that will “accelerate the development timeline of full-scale eVTOL aircraft via simulation or flight test” targeting the design and execution of experiments on relevant, full-scale AAM systems to generate “research-quality data to build up flight dynamics modeling and simulation of full-scale, multi-rotor eVTOL aircraft, with an emphasis on high/increased-fidelity real-time aerodynamics.” This proposal presents a plan to address these goals through the acquisition of valuable, new flight test data for a representative full-scale eVTOL aircraft and utilizing this test data to improve upon the aerodynamic model fidelity currently available within real-time, piloted eVTOL flight simulations.