Hovering Vehicle Design and Analysis Techniques

Catalog description

This course aims at providing an overview of the fundamental concepts in the design and analysis of helicopters. The course will start with an overview of how helicopters of various types work (single main rotor, tandem rotor, tilt-rotor, quad-copter etc.). This will be followed by the introduction of how rotors work with a specific emphasis on the aerodynamic operating environment. The course will introduce topics pertaining to the rotor wake, inflow and will provide opportunities to exercise analysis techniques such as momentum and blade element theory. The latter portion of the course will cover the dynamic operation of larger scale rotors and will introduce concepts of blade articulation and associated analysis models/techniques. The content of the course will be laid to showcase the varying operating environments of rotor at different scales (e.g. small quadcopter, large multi-person carrier etc). The course will require students to code their analysis models using the language of their choice (C, C++, FORTRAN, MATLAB, Python etc.) and is intended to emphasize the importance of computational methods to engineering analysis. MEAM 2110 and MEAM 2020 or equivalent and required , MEAM 3020 and MEAM 3210 are recommended. Recommended textbook: Principles of Helicopter Aerodynamics, 2nd Edition, J. Gordon Leishman, ISBN-13: 978-1107013353, ISBN-10: 1107013356