Title of dissertation: SIMULATION MODELING OF FLIGHT DYNAMICS, CONTROL AND TRAJECTORY OPTIMIZATION OF ROTORCRAFT TOWING SUBMERGED LOADS Ananth Sridharan, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation directed by: Professor Roberto Celi Department of Aerospace Engineering This work presents the mathematical modeling and analysis of helicopters towing submerged loads using long cables for sub-surface o...

A nano coaxial rotor was designed, fabricated and studied experimentally at an ultralow Reynolds number ranging from 5000 to 20,000. The Minimum Induced Loss theory was employed to optimize the geometry of nano coaxial rotor with the introduction of weights to take into account the interference of upper rotor and lower rotor. The chord and twist distributions of both rotors were achieved as a r...

Many bacteria are propelled by flagellar motors that stochastically switch between the clockwise and counterclockwise rotation direction. Although the switching dynamics is one of their most important characteristics, the mechanisms that control it are poorly understood. We present a statistical-mechanical model of the bacterial flagellar motor. At its heart is the assumption that the rotor pro...

Groups of eukaryotic cilia and flagella are capable of coordinating their beating over large scales, routinely exhibiting collective dynamics in the form of metachronal waves. The origin of this behavior--possibly influenced by both mechanical interactions and direct biological regulation--is poorly understood, in large part due to a lack of quantitative experimental studies. Here we characteri...

The bacterial flagellar motor plays a crucial role in both bacterial locomotion and chemotaxis. Recent experiments reveal that the switching dynamics of the motor depend on the rotation speed of the motor, and thus the motor torque, nonmonotonically. Here we present a unified mathematical model which treats motor torque generation based on experimental torque-speed curves and the torque-depende...

Air-film damping, which dominates over other losses, plays a significant role in the dynamic response of many micro-fabricated devices with a movable mass suspended by various bearing mechanisms. Modeling the damping characteristics accurately will be greatly helpful to the bearing design, control, and test in various micromotor devices. This paper presents the simulated and experimental squeez...

The US Army Aeroflightdynamics Directorate (AFDD), the French Office National d’Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) are working under the United States/France Memorandum of Agreement on Helicopter Aeromechanics to study rotorcraft aeromechanics issues of interest to both nations. As a task under this agreement, a comparative study of the D...

The tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (TRUAV) is characterized by both multi-rotor vertical takeoff or landing and fixed-wing long-duration flight. Not only the structure of TRUAV complex, but also aerodynamic coupling severe. Especially when in transition mode, rotor flow field wake are complicated. abnormal variation force blades will directly affect balance manipulation aircraft. downwash g...

This article presents a sensorless five level DTC control based on neural networks using Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) applied to Double Star Induction Machine (DSIM). The application of the DTC control brings a very interesting solution to the problems of robustness and dynamics. However, this control has some drawbacks such as the uncontrolled of the switching frequency and the strong ripple t...