Flower of Design

Rotary Wing Flight Dynamics

2017-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Rotary Wing Flight Dynamics

21 December 2017 - Travelling

The flight dynamics and sizing of helicopters intended for specific missions is an interesting one and with the growth in multi rotor drones and hybrid vehicles it has much scope for further work. After a brief look at various texts I have decided to develop a series of algorithms from the equations in the book “Principles of Helicopter Aerodynamics” by J. Gordon Leishman. Colleagues recommended different books and indeed a very advanced text examining rotor aeroelasticity due to my interest in the Hiller large tipjet powered helicopter. The potential of large helicopters such as this which feature jets on the fuselage as well opens up interesting opportunities for autogiro cruise modes for a very interesting vehicle overall. My aim will be to attempt to derive information regarding the hiller project and use them in the algorithms to better understand what the flight dynamics of such a large helicopter might be like. Hiller Monster Chopper Project Notebook

RSE Cloud Fellowship

2017-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

RSE Cloud Fellowship

23 November 2017 - Cranfield

I was very fortunate recently to win an RSE Cloud Computing Fellowship. There are many things now to do to make this a success and I hope to be as open as possible so that the work can have the greatest possible impact. It is my particular hope to work closely with the Dronecode Foundation to make it easier for fellow researchers to connect their drones into an architecture that will best serve them in automating their experiment workflows and making sure their aircraft are used to their full effectiveness.

Aircraft Sizing

2017-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Aircraft Sizing

14 September 2017 - Cranfield

Some months ago I did an python introduction tutorial to show to some of our students the power of Python for aircraft design.

Aircraft Sizing Worked Example

Github Repository

I did a worked example from chapter 3 from Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach 3rd edition by Daniel P. Raymer. An excellent resource for learning the conceptual design of aircraft indeed.

Things have moved on in the software stakes and by writing aircraft concepts as python functions we can then apply very powerful methods from libraries like scipy to find optimal tradeoffs for items such as the ideal Takeoff weight or the design empty weight fraction of our intended aircraft.

I probably won’t do too many more worked examples as It wouldn’t be fair to Daniel and I encourage anyone in this field to buy his book.

Hopefully in the future we can take a look at using CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) for further tasks in aircraft design. Interfacing design with CAD programs and files is a non trivial exercise but the results can be extremely powerful. I used to use a tool for aircraft design called Profili and it was good for its day but I think we can do much better by applying more modern techniques and some of the wealth of resource that can be found in the open source CAE community.

Airlander Future

2017-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Airlander Future

13 September 2017 - Shortstown

I was quite sad to hear last week that Hybrid Air Vehicles will be leaving Shed 1.ITV News article This was perhaps inevitable given the small airfield available.

I am very curious where they will end up and while I hope it will be Cranfield we shall have to wait and see. There are big things afoot at Cranfield and the digital aviation initiative is especially exciting.Cranfield DARTEC

Combined with MUEAVI Cranfield will be quite the hub for innovation in autonomy and advanced systems. :-)

I hope to be able to share some of the new ideas here as we progress.

Testing Github Pages

2017-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Testing Github Pages

20 July 2017 - Cranfield

This may or may not be a sensible way to do things but I need a way to host code and share figures FOIA2017/0440