Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Design Challenge

This design challenge hosted by NASA tasks university students with designing an Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicle capable of safe operation in extreme weather conditions experienced by a select urban metro area. The designed aircraft must also adhere to conventional safety standards and regulations in addition to the additional criteria for safe urban flight.

More information regarding the design competition can be found here. 

Modeling and Aerodynamic Simulations:

One of my main responsibilities in this project was to translate dimensions and other geometric elements of our design from calculated numbers to a generated 3D model of our aircraft. OpenVSP, an aircraft geometry tool originally developed by NASA, was used to create models of the main aircraft and its propellers. These models utilized in simulated analysis to gather information about the aerodynamic performance such as the lift curves and drag polars. After this model was iterated upon and refined, it was exported for further aerodynamic analysis using FlightStream, a higher fidelity aerodynamic modeling software capable of integrating complex elements in its analysis such as high lift devices or compressible flow. 

Matlab Computations and Plot Generation:

To efficiently generate data about the aircraft's potential performance for different geometric parameters and configurations, I utilized MatLab code to streamline calculations using equations from researched written sources. Calculations I performed primarily revolved around power consumption in both flight configurations for varying propeller setups, payload, flight speeds, rates of climb, and more.