VABS Enabled Design Environment for Efficient High-Fidelity Composite Rotor Blade and Wing Section Design

This SBIR aims at developing a high-fidelity, yet efficient and easy-to-use, composite rotor blade and wing section design environment to facilitate rapid and confident aeromechanics assessment during conceptual design stages. A well-known technical barrier for composite rotor blade and wing section design is the lack of an efficient, user friendly, high-fidelity design tool to realistically represent the blade section at the conceptual level. This limitation prevents designers from accurately yet efficiently generating sectional properties, easily invoking comprehensive analyses, and rapidly and confidently predicting the stress distribution. As a result, aeromechanical analysis (e.g. for stability, loads, and vibration) is unfortunately left out of the conceptual design phase. In order to overcome this technical barrier and limitation, we propose to improve the functionalities of VABS (Variational Asymptotic Beam Section analysis), the best proven technology for realistic composite rotor blade analysis, and seamlessly integrate it with a versatile CAD environment, a robust optimizer, and a general-purpose postprocessor, all of which are specially tailored for blade and wing section design. We will create the initial capability in Phase I, leading to the full capability of a VABS enabled design environment for efficient high-fidelity composite rotor blade and wing section design in Phase II.