Proprotor Hover Performance and Wing Download for the RAVEN eVTOL Aircraft

In the past several years, a number of large-scale prototype electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft have been flight tested by aircraft manufacturers to achieve their commercial product development goals for the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) market. Owing to intellectual property and propriety information concerns, however, relatively few large-scale eVTOL aircraft have been flight tested for research purposes to produce data that can be published to benefit the broader aeronautics community. The corresponding lack of available flight test data makes it difficult for researchers to validate and improve computational tools that are needed for advancing the state of the art in eVTOL aircraft design. The proposed Phase II effort will advance the development of the Research Aircraft for eVTOL Enabling techNologies (RAVEN). RAVEN is an eVTOL aircraft with a gross weight in excess of 1000 lbs that is being developed to conduct flight research related to acoustics, flight dynamics and control, interactional aerodynamics, and autonomy for AAM aircraft. The work in Phase II will focus on experimental measurements of the download forces produced by the wingtip proprotors on the wing in hover. These experiments will be carried out using full-scale RAVEN wing and proprotor components. The work will also investigate modified wing designs for RAVEN to reduce download, weight, and cruise drag.