Performance Validation of A Novel High Speed, eVTOL Compound Helicopter Demonstrator
Performance Validation of A Novel High Speed, eVTOL Compound Helicopter Demonstrator
Performance Validation of A Novel High Speed, eVTOL Compound Helicopter Demonstrator
Joseph J. Andrews
Kymatics, LLC
[email protected]
Oakland, CA
ABSTRACT
A novel Group 2 UAV was designed, built, and hover tested to develop a new eVTOL configuration capable of high-
speed, long endurance flight without compromising on hover endurance. The design focused on payload capability, speed,
lifetime cost, safety, and reliability to balance the design requirements. Commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) parts were used to
focus on a first principles validation study at limited cost in order to reduce risk on the design prior to a fully custom, high
performance design effort. The design lends favorably to future scaling to sizes required for passenger transport. Rotorcraft
Comprehensive Analysis System (RCAS) was used to predict gross rotor performance in hover and forward flight. The
RCAS results were used to inform the design trade study. The design was built and tested on a custom test stand and
compared to the RCAS results in order to validate the trade study hover performance.
1
In recent years, many are attempting to bring the
quadcopter’s design simplicity in the UAV world to Cruise Power =
passenger transport. A fully electric platform is a
Equation 3: Cruise Power
desirable option in replacing fossil fuels for a sustainable
future. Their redundancy is often touted as a safety
As it is commonly known that batteries store less
feature in conversation, while quietly avoiding
energy per pound than fossil fuels, electric flight becomes
implications on long term maintenance costs. Most have
an exercise in efficiency. From simple momentum theory
focused on urban air mobility (UAM), where hover is a
(Equation 1), the overarching challenge of VTOL
small consideration of the planned flight envelope.
efficiency is to reduce disk loading as much as possible.
In the traditional turbine helicopter world, there is an
For a given disk loading and airfoil selection, multiple
increased priority to replace aging single-main rotor
rotors will be less efficient than a similarly sized single-
designs with designs capable of higher speeds. These
main rotor. The reduction in rotor radius incurs a
have predominately included coaxial and tiltrotor designs
Reynolds number penalty [2]. If solidity is kept constant,
where the added complexity is a necessity to avoid blade
it incurs a significant figure of merit penalty. If solidity is
stall at speed or human factor impacts, respectively. The
adjusted for optimal hover performance, there are rotor
requirements drive mechanical complexity, reliability,
drag penalties in forward flight. However, this may be
and safety in tiltrotors, or a packaging effort that results in
mitigated through airfoil optimization at each scale.
higher empty weight fractions and/or hub separation
aerodynamic penalties in coaxial designs at full scale. In The additional rotors and associated electronics of
these cases, fossil fuel free design considerations have not electric propulsion, each of which contain several hundred
yet been considered. As evidenced by almost any vehicle components, drive up repair costs as it reduces MTBF
industry, in general, speed is expensive. (Equation 2). With aircraft repair costs sometimes
exceeding $1000/hr as of this writing, this can add up to
Kymatics undertook a design study over two years ago
significant repair and opportunity costs over the lifetime
to find a solution to electric flight at the UAV scale which
of the aircraft. Looking at the wind turbine industry
would enable high speed while maintaining hover
whose sole purpose as an industry is to generate as much
efficiency. In order to inform the design, many aspects of
power as efficiently as possible using an electric drive
physics were considered. Of those, the following first-
train, it is reinforcement that size and component-count
principles equations were drivers:
matter.
2
configuration covered in this paper. Both examples were DESIGN
calculated with a 23 lb Basic Design Gross Weight
(BDGW) and 2 lb/ft^2 disk loading. Given the motivation, it is seen that keeping the
design to two traditional rotors is ideal. It enables high
The first of these is the quadcopter compound speed flight, while minimizing component count. As in
configuration. Four propellers are used for hover as in traditional fixed wing, it is also beneficial to separate the
quadcopters. When the transition to forward flight is jobs of lifting, propulsion, and control. Additionally,
made, a wing, aileron, rudder, and elevator are used. The tilting surfaces and coaxial designs at the UAV scale
rotors are typically stopped inline with the direction of prove difficult to manufacture for reliability and
travel, such that they provide a very low drag penalty performance in multiple areas.
compared to using the rotors for lift in forward flight.
However, a simple stress calculation [3] would reveal that All these considerations led to the design proposed in
for the simple geometry chosen, 62 mph is the point that a this paper, a transverse rotor compound (Figure 2). Much
1-degree angle of attack would cause mechanical failure to the author’s dismay, this was a re-discovery of a mostly
of the rotor. To maintain a safety factor, 55 mph would ignored configuration around since the 1940’s. The first
have to be the maximum speed for this configuration transverse rotor was developed in 1936, with the Focke-
without design changes and necessitates a restrictive pitch Wulf Fw 61 [1]. While this was not a compound, there
envelope. More realistically, the maximum velocity will are some that have been designed. It remains a novel
be lower as the center of lift leads the center of gravity. design, as there is no evidence available to the author of
As such, it is expected that dynamic instability would testing the compound configuration in literature.
occur when the negative aerodynamic damping exceeds
any built-in structural damping. With these structural,
stability and fatigue concerns, speeds exceeding 60 mph
would start to require design changes to maintain
structural integrity and would become more difficult with
increasing velocity.
3
distributed drive system by design. Power to the rotors A future version with custom designed parts would
and propulsor can be lost, without losing the aircraft. As enable higher speeds, as well as increased reliability and
the rotors are used mainly for control, the rotor speed can range. The design enables fixed-wing level dual-
be reduced dramatically in steady level flight, reducing redundancy by design and maintains a minimal number of
drag. As such, the rotor drag can be estimated from fixed rotors for reliability. This lends well to high-
autogiro equations [4]. Power requirements can be reliability military UAV designs, where it can be scaled
estimated with Equation 3, where drag components down to <class 1 sizes.
include: wing/body induced, wing/body profile, rotors,
When scaled up, the required wingspan is more
hub, nacelles, and shafts.
appropriate in commercial applications, namely regional
Control actuators in the design are only used on the transport, as the coaxial helicopter is more compact for
rotors. This reduces part count, as additional control military applications. For a four-person vehicle, storage
surfaces on the body are unnecessarily redundant. A full dimensions would be equivalent to a Cesna 172.
complement of three rotor swashplate controls allows for
Though it would need quite a bit of effort and
additional safety. Loss of any one actuator on the rotors
validation, the increase in size would allow design
results only in degraded-mode control of the aircraft on
changes for envelope expansion well into the supersonic
that axis.
regime; the largest of which is power density/range.
While hover differential roll cyclic can be used to
Table 1: Sparrow Demonstrator Specifications
offset download losses, it is expected to be incur higher
losses at these low disk loadings. By reducing lift over Class
the wing, the inflow velocities over the wing would be COTS 4-person
Parameter Original 2
Demo Commercial
reduced therefore reducing drag velocities on the wing. UAV
However, non-uniform losses are expected to outweigh BDGW
2.1 lbs ~23 lbs
rotor download from non-uniform inflow losses with up (No 20 lb 4000 lbs
(meas.) (meas.)
to 30% inflow losses vs 8% wing download losses for the Payload)
COTS demonstrator. A proper study would have to be Max
0 lbs 20 lbs 30 lbs 1000 lbs
conducted to characterize inflow velocities at which Payload
differential cyclic can help. Wingspan
2.62 ft 6 ft 6 ft 60 ft
In operation
During the trade study, the design appeared overly
optimistic. As such, the effort described in this paper Wingspan
- <4 ft <4 ft ~34 ft
Folded
focuses on a demonstrator leveraging COTS parts to
Hover
validate the methodology. While far from optimal, the
Endurance 100+
demonstrator can prove out many of the touted features at 7.5 min 37 min 120+ min
(No min
significant cost reduction. Because of the relationship payload)
between hover efficiency and wingspan, the wingspan Rotor 2.62
2.62 ft 2.62 ft 27.5 ft
was maximized, within reason, in order to maximize Diameter ft
hover times possible on electric power. Reasonable
Rotor
folded-rotor sizes were chosen based on existing aircraft Figure 0.22 ~0.45 0.6 0.75
to ensure similar storage sizes. The proposed range and of Merit
endurance would ideally remove much of the need for
Vmax goal - 170 kts 250 kt 350+ kt
ultra-compact transportability.
Range
The goal of the demonstrator would target a 170 knots (10 min.
top speed to prove out the design methodology and flight hover, 25+ 120+
-
control. Additionally, a strong focus would be placed on 5 min. miles miles >200 miles
validating hover efficiency; the topic of this paper. reserve
)
4
Specifications for the COTS demonstrator, production 0.70 Rotor Speed
(%NR)
UAV and a full-scale commercial vehicle are listed in
0.60 19%
Table 1. To note, Table 1 is based test data collected in 25%
Figure of Merit
44%
ANALYSIS 0.40
50%
56%
For rotor performance simulation, Rotorcraft 0.30
63%
analytically generated airfoil data. The necessary Figure 4: 2-bladed Rotor Efficiency (RCAS Results)
corrections will be noted to correct future endeavors. The
airfoil data in C81 table format was generated using XFoil
[5]. 19%
25%
The rotor used for this study was an easily obtainable, 31%
38%
commercial off-the-shelf design which uses untwisted 44%
Thrust (lbs)
carbon fiber blades with a NACA0012 profile. Both 2- 50%
56%
blade and 4-blade variants were available at the same
63%
rotor radius, so both were analyzed in RCAS to compare 69%
performance characteristics. 75%
81%
Rotor Speed
(%NR) Figure 5: 4-bladed Rotor Performance (RCAS Results)
19% 0.70 Rotor Speed
25% (%NR)
31% 19%
0.60
38% 25%
44%
31%
Thrust (lbs)
50% 0.50
38%
56%
44%
Figure of Merit
63%
0.40
69% 50%
75% 56%
81% 0.30 63%
88%
69%
94%
0.20 75%
100%
81%
0.10 88%
Power (Watts)
94%
0.00 100%
Thrust (lbs)
Figure 3: 2-bladed Rotor Performance (RCAS Results)
Figure 6: 4-bladed Rotor Efficiency (RCAS Results)
Because the rotors are held to a constant radius and
chord (the blades for the 2 and 4-bladed rotors are the
same), the thrust generated at any given rotor speed is
significantly greater for the 4-bladed rotor. The figure of
5
merit for the 4-bladed rotor is only slightly higher
analytically.
TEST STAND
6
While the control electronics for the electric motor
included power measurements, the results during initial
measurements proved suspect and un-correlated. As a
result, power draw measurements for the system were
obtained using a Rigol DS1052e oscilloscope and an
AEMC SL261 AC/DC current probe on the DC input
side. These were chosen to accurately measure the high
frequency content. The DC current average calculated on
the Rigol was recorded over USB with the NI-VISA
software suite and Python.
7
ground resonance issues or issues from lack of damping
in the rotor system. Issues persisted on the simplified
system, but at a higher operating speed. It was found later
0.60
RCAS - 63% NR
RCAS - 56% NR
0.50 RCAS - 50% NR
RCAS - 63% NR RCAS - 44% NR
RCAS - 56% NR 0.40 RCAS - 38% NR
RCAS - 50% NR RCAS - 31% NR
FM
RCAS - 44% NR
Thrust (lbs)
Test - 31% NR
RCAS - 38% NR 0.30
RCAS - 31% NR Test - 38% NR
RCAS - 25% NR Test - 44% NR
Test - 25% NR 0.20 Test - 50% NR
Test - 31% NR
Test - 56% NR
Test - 38% NR
Test - 44% NR 0.10
Test - 63% NR
Test - 50% NR
Test - 56% NR
Test - 63% NR 0.00
Thrust (lbs)
8
the same collective setting. The figure of merit
differences can be attributed to an apparent
RCAS - 63% NR
underprediction of induced power. RCAS - 56% NR
RCAS - 50% NR
RCAS - 44% NR
RCAS - 38% NR
Thrust (lbs)
RCAS - 63% NR RCAS - 31% NR
RCAS - 56% NR RCAS - 25% NR
RCAS - 50% NR Test - 25% NR
RCAS - 44% NR
Test - 31% NR
RCAS - 38% NR
RCAS - 31% NR Test - 38% NR
Test - 44% NR
CT/σ
RCAS - 25% NR
Test - 25% NR Test - 50% NR
Test - 31% NR Test - 56% NR
Test - 38% NR
Test - 63% NR
Test - 44% NR
Test - 50% NR
Test - 56% NR
Test - 63% NR Induced Rotor Power (Watts)
RCAS - 31% NR
collective, which would typically rule out flap-lag Test - 31% NR
0.30
instabilities in rigid rotors. The lack of instrumentation Test - 38% NR
Test - 44% NR
drove a modification to remove flap-lag degrees of 0.20 Test - 50% NR
freedom from the articulation. This resulted in successful Test - 56% NR
data collection, see subsequent figures, yet was stopped Test - 63% NR
0.10
9
CONCLUSIONS
Test - 31% NR
Test - 38% NR
Test - 44% NR
Test - 50% NR
Test - 56% NR
Test - 63% NR REFERENCES
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worse with thrust. This is a common area of hover and Space Administration, 2011.
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Journal of the American Helicopter Society, 2008, Vol.
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54.
range for this design where much work remains. First
flight is planned for 2020.
10