The number of commercial space operations is increasing and is expected to continue to do so in the future. The operating concepts for launch and reentry vehicle operators is also evolving and currently includes conventional rocket launches and re-entries, rocket launches with multi-stage flybacks and captive carry air launched payloads. In the context of this rapidly changing environment, there is a growing need to develop tools to safely, efficiently and equitably coordinate air and space operations. In this paper we introduce an approach for generating dynamic AHAs which would enable significantly smaller/shorter duration AHAs to be used operationally. This system performs real-time calculations of debris contours within a few seconds based on the state vector information that can be collected during launch-and-reentry missions.

This paper investigates using the Boeing 737 MAX crashes as a case study to improve undergraduate aerospace engineering students’ comprehension of aircraft certification and the safety implications of engineering design. Two 737 MAX crashes happened within a period of six months and are linked to activation of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). As the investigations unfold, many important questions are being posed with respect to design decisions and operational assumptions. Current aerospace engineering students are exposed to media accounts and expert opinions via multiple sources as well as to classroom discussions on the topic. This paper investigates the effects of a systematic case study on student perceptions with respect to professional responsibilities and engineering design choice implications as linked to ABET student outcomes (2 and 4). Junior and senior aerospace engineering students’ perceptions are assessed before and after participation in case study presentations.

Reconfigurable drones were developed, tested, and flown in multiple configurations in order to model flight characteristics for missions with varying requirements of employed drones. This resulted in the successful production of an evaluation function that identifies optimal drones for missions. Missions include tasks such as hovering in a desired position for a set amount of time, designated stationary flight, and flying a distance greater than one hundred meters and returning, designated long range flight. The ranking function considers a particular drone configuration’s maximum payload, hover time, maximum speed, maximum range, and steadiness in relation to other drones and weighs each according to the requirements of the mission.

A significant challenge in estimating operational feasibility of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) missions lies in understanding how choices in design impact the performance of a complex system-of-systems. This work examines the ability of the UAM ecosystem and the operations within it to meet a variety of demand profiles that may emerge in the coming years. We perform a set of simulation driven feasibility and scalability analyses based on UAM operational models with the goal of estimating capacity and throughput for a given set of parameters that represent an operational UAM ecosystem. UAM ecosystem design guidelines, vehicle constraints, and effective operational policies can be drawn from our analysis. Results show that, while critical for enabling UAM, the performance of the UAM ecosystem is robust to variations in ground infrastructure and fleet design decisions, while being sensitive to decisions for fleet and traffic management policies. We show that so long as the ecosystem design parameters for ground infrastructure and fleet design fall within a sensible range, the performance of the UAM ecosystem is affected by the policies used to manage the UAM traffic.

An open-source implementation of the Amiet model for turbulence-airfoil interaction noise implemented in Python programming language is presented. The proposed implementation, named \verb|amiet_tools|, allows the user to calculate the unsteady surface pressure jump and the radiated acoustic pressure due to a single or multiple turbulent gusts interacting with a flat plate airfoil. Secondary effects such as the acoustic near-field, finite-span effects, subcritical gusts contribution, and sound refraction at a planar shear layer are available for simulating a realistic open-jet wind tunnel test setup. Prediction results are presented and compared to measured acoustic pressures obtained in an open-jet wind tunnel with a planar spiral microphone array, and good agreement is obtained over a wide range of frequencies. A link for downloading the package codes and sample experimental data is included. It is expected the proposed implementation can be adopted as a quick benchmark for more advanced analytical airfoil noise models and experimental measurements.

The High Lift version of the Common Research Model (CRM-HL) is a geometry set developed to enable high lift configurations representative of those found on modern commercial airliners to be made available in the public domain. An effort is underway to create an ecosystem around this geometry set that will enable multiple users to collaborate on key common configurations that produce flow physics scenarios of shared interest. Such configurations will be referred to as reference configurations. Anticipated collaborative topics include CFD tool improvement and validation, technology development, and wind tunnel data acquisition methodology development. This paper will define two such reference configurations with the goal of establishing common geometry for these future efforts. It will include a discussion of the objectives for these configurations as well as the rationale behind their selection. It will also provide detailed configuration descriptions, broken down into the individual geometry elements.

Initial assumptions for the airspace integration of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations indicate that separation from traditional operations may be achieved through strategic segregation. Early adoption of urban air mobility (UAM) using vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft could be shuttle-like service between downtown and airports, given that timely arrival to airports are more critical than many other purposes of roadway trips. Such UAM operations require that vertiports are located on or near airports. VTOLs routes arriving at and departing from vertiports will need to carefully designed to support the sharing of terminal airspace without causing any safety concerns. Using a combination of geographical information system tools and trajectory planning algorithms, this research seeks to evaluate the feasibility of Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) trajectories in the airport area and examine potential vertiport locations within or near the terminal environment. Present operations at one major airport were modeled to create a baseline of current manned operations. A Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm was employed to design minimum cost VTOL trajectories that stay a specified distance from current manned operations, terrain features, and obstacles. The research examined the challenges and constraints associated with VTOL routes arriving and departing from several likely vertiport locations and suggested future methods to stay clear of current manned aircraft trajectories

Coupled multidisciplinary sensitivity analysis is required for accurate design optimization in the simulation of many physical problems. Hence, in this work we look at the coupled thermo-elastic optimization capability of a finite-element solver developed in-house called AStrO. We validate AStrO’s thermo-elastic sensitivity analysis and optimization capability by looking at multiple static and transient problems. Exact sensitivities calculated through the discrete adjoint method are presented for all the cases. Finally, the baseline and thermo-elastic optimization results for an aerodynamically heated panel case are used in an aero-thermo-elastic analysis. The aero-thermo-elastic analysis of this panel case shows how the thermo-elastic optimization of the panel modifies the flow solution. The in-house aero-thermo-elastic analysis platform used in this study was validated in previous work.

We address the initial stages of the development of a dynamic-soaring capable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with morphing wing technology optimized for long-duration flight with minimal on-board power consumption. The proposed aircraft model is designed to include the effects of a controlled vehicle morphing using telescoping wing. The current paper focuses on preparation of a hybrid aerodynamic model for the flight simulation of the vehicle. Such variable-fidelity model efficiently combines results from a potential flow solver and RANS simulations, validated using available experimental data. The effects of the morphing wing on the vehicle aerodynamic performance are examined for the selected critical stages of the dynamic-soaring maneuver and illustrate the possible benefits of the proposed morphing-wing design.

In this paper we present a simplified form of the local correlation-based zero-equation kγ transition model (Sandhu, Jatinder Pal Singh, "Local-Correlation Based Zero-Equation Transition Model for Turbomachinery," Proceedings of the ASME 2019 Gas Turbine India Conference, Volume 1: Compressors, Fans, and Pumps; Turbines; Heat Transfer; Structures and Dynamics) derived from the one-equation γ transition model (Menter, F. R., Smirnov, P. E., Liu, T., and Avancha, R., “A One-Equation Local Correlation-Based Transition Model,” Flow, Turbulence and Combustion, vol. 95, 2015, pp. 583–619). The new model is easy to implement and saves computational time and memory. The proposed model is validated against the standard T3 series flat plate test cases (with and without pressure gradient), Hultgren and Volino series, Aerospatial A-Airfoil and the Eppler-387 airfoil. Results indicate that the transition predicted with the new model is similar to the one-equation γ transition model in most cases and compares reasonably well with experimental data. The predicted transition is also gradual in some cases and the method provides a savings in computational memory and time (in most of the flat-plate test cases) over the γ model