Research Partnership with MITACS
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22, MAR 2022
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POSTED BY Limosa
Today we are happy to announce that we have secured our first research partnership with MITACS and Concordia University to accelerate the development of LimoConnect. We are pleased to welcome new postdoctoral fellows to our family through the very competitive Mitacs Elevate Postdoctoral Fellowship program.
Active research and development are at the heart of eVTOL companies and there is no exception for Limosa inc. We are always seeking for innovative and bright ideas trying to tackle the existing challenges from new perspectives carried out by passionate and dedicated researchers.
The projects are listed below.
High-Fidelity Aerodynamic Optimization of eVTOL Rotor Designs:
This project will look at the optimization of electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) rotors as a balance between the hover and forward flight configurations. Through a combination of in-house high order Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses and adjoint-based optimization, it is expected that this will result in an increase in range and flight times for eVTOL aircraft, increasing their range of operation and commercial feasibility.
Analysis of initially curved composite wing-stabilizer structure of eVTOL using dimensional reduction method; simulation, and optimization:
The aerodynamic design of the wing-stabilizers of eVTOL led to an initially curved tail wing-stabilizer in which four propellers must be installed on them for hover and cruise states. The present research aims to design the initially curved composite wing-stabilizer. This structure includes different composite substructures such as stringers, ribs and spars which are subjected to different loadings such as bending, and torsion.
The stress, failure, and flutter analysis of such a structure using 3D finite element analysis is considerably time-consuming. In the present research, a novel method as Variational Asymptotic Beam Sectional Analysis (VABS) will be used to perform stress, strains, failure, and flutter analyses of fully composite tail wing-stabilizers of the eVTOL. It splits a 3D geometrical beam structure to a 2D cross-sectional analysis and a 1D beam analysis. This method saves computational time considerably compared to 3D finite element method. The optimization will be employed to come up with the best wing-stabilizer configuration. Finally, the obtained best configuration of wing-stabilizer will be modeled with a high-fidelity full 3D finite element method to validate the design.
Acoustic Impact Analysis of Optimized eVTOL Rotor Designs:
A curcial aspect for the adoption of eVTOLs concerns the determination and the mitigation of the noise generated during urban mission operations. Currently, most of the noise impact analysis relies on empirical correlations, wind tunnel testing and low-fidelity computational methods. These inefficiencies in accurate acoustic footprint prediction, prevent the development of cost-effective and reliable design cycles for eVTOL. In this research, a novel methodology, based on high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics, which taps into the power of the GPU-accelerated computing paradigm, to deliver a fast and accurate noise propagation prediction in urban environments. This approach will hence provide the eVTOL aeroacoustic engineers with an integrated design tool for robust and efficient design cycles.
