Maks J Groom
Undergraduate Student, MIT

"A Mid-Fidelity Numerical Framework for Efficient Prediction of Propeller-Wing Interaction Noise"

ABSTRACT: Aerodynamic noise is an important design consideration for many aircraft, including Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems that are expected to operate in particularly close proximity to people. This talk introduces a mid-fidelity framework for predicting farfield tonal noise from unsteady wake-body interactions that may occur in UAM systems, using a panel-vortex particle method coupled with the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings (FW-H) aeroacoustic analogy. Predictions for an isolated propeller benchmark case are presented to validate the method against experimental and numerical results, and the method is then applied to a simple propeller-wing interaction problem.

BIO: Maks Groom is a second year undergraduate majoring in mathematics. He is interested in numerical analysis and differential equations with applications to fluid dynamics.

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Runda Ji
CFD Application Engineer, Flexcompute

"Comparison between automated rotor analysis tools: high-fidelity CFD simulation with automatic meshing, blade element theory, and momentum theory"

ABSTRACT: We introduce a novel workflow to simplify and accelerate the traditional high-fidelity rotor simulations by integrating (1) parameterized CAD preparation (2) automated mesh generation and (3) ultra-fast high-fidelity CFD solver into an end-to-end process.
We quantify the limitations, under certain circumferences, of the momentum theory and the blade element theory (BET) to demonstrate the advantage of running such high-fidelity CFD simulations. Using Xrotor, BET and our high-fidelity CFD solver, we investigate the XV-15 tiltrotor at two different flight conditions: (1) airplane propeller mode in forward flight and (2) helicopter hovering mode, where the limitations of the momentum theory and BET could cause potential design failure. A major cause for this is the tip vortex of the preceding blade. 

BIO: Runda Ji is a CFD Application Engineer at Flexcompute and he is primarily working on parameterized geometry and automatic surface/volume mesh generation.