The computation of takeoff distance for powered-lift aircraft is complicated because of the coupling of aerodynamic performance (lift, drag and moment coefficients) with forward speed. Cal Poly has developed an analysis procedure to capture this coupling, and the development of this procedure is continuing. In the past year, Cal Poly has completed a Phase I NRA contract from the NASA for the co...

During the moult, birds sequentially replace their flight feathers and thus temporarily have gaps in their wings. These gaps will vary in size and position(s) during the course of the moult. We investigated the aerodynamic effects of having moult gaps in a rectangular wing by using a vortex-lattice (panel) approach, and we modelled the effect of moult gap size at the wing moult initiation posit...

The NASA F-15 Intelligent Flight Control System project team has developed a series of flight control concepts designed to demonstrate the benefits of a neural network-based adaptive controller. The objective of the team is to develop and flight-test control systems that use neural network technology to optimize the performance of the aircraft under nominal conditions as well as stabilize the a...

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the aerodynamic characteristics of a bio-inspired corrugated airfoil compared with a streamlined airfoil and a flat plate at the chord Reynolds number of Re= 58,000 ~ 125,000 to explore the potential applications of such bio-inspired corrugated airfoils for micro air vehicle (MAV) designs. In addition to measuring the aerodynamic lift and drag ...

This study presents an aeroelastic wing shaping control concept for distributed propulsion aircraft. By leveraging wing flexibility, wing-mounted distributed propulsion can be used to re-twist wing shapes in-flight to improve aerodynamic efficiency. A multidisciplinary approach is used to develop an aero-propulsive-elastic model of a highly flexible wing distributed propulsion transport aircraf...

A procedure based on MATLAB combined with ANSYS is presented and utilized for the multi-objective aerodynamic and structural optimization of horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) blades. In order to minimize the cost of energy (COE) and improve the overall performance of the blades, materials of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) combined with glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) are applied...