Drone Simulations for Urban Air Mobility

Presented by:

David Karman, Aerodynamics Engineer
CycloTech GmbH

Gabriel Cojocaru, Principal Engineer
Convergent Science

Electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) shows promise as a potential solution for urban air mobility (UAM). However, despite numerous advances in the last two decades, many challenges must still be overcome to enable widespread UAM-drone implementation. Some of these challenges are regulatory (e.g., safety, autonomous pilots, noise), while others are technical. In this webinar hosted with CycloTech, we will demonstrate how CONVERGE can overcome problems related to the application of external aerodynamics to rotor and UAM-drone simulations to study aerodynamic performance, stability, and noise generation and propagation. Thanks to its autonomous meshing, coupled with Adaptive Mesh Refinement and inlaid meshing, CONVERGE can tackle these problems with minimal pre-processing effort, enabling engineers to increase their productivity and analyze a greater number of scenarios. Broadband noise source and acoustic analogy methods, such as the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings model, can identify possible noise sources and predict noise propagation to the far field, allowing engineers to decrease noise pollution from drones. For stability analysis, CONVERGE offers simplified rotor models, including the actuator line model, that provide higher efficiency than blade-resolved simulations without sacrificing the sensitivity of the analysis. David Karman, Aerodynamics Engineer at CycloTech, will discuss his studies using CONVERGE to investigate drone hovering and forward flight as well as aeroacoustic analysis.