Date of Award

Spring 2023

Access Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering

Department

Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

Vladimir Golubev

First Committee Member

Vladimir Golubev

Second Committee Member

Reda Mankbadi

Third Committee Member

Anatasios Lyrintzis

Abstract

Nowadays, the number of Advance Air Mobility (AAM) Electic Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) concepts is rapidly increasing due to their capability of vertical take-off and landing at vertiports located on rooftops of tall urban buildings, which does not require using the ground space in a condensed urban environment. Such flight operations, however, will be greatly affected by the vertiport’s highly unsteady, turbulent flow environment. The goal of this study is to model the turbulent wind interaction with a building to understand the unsteady flow characteristics around vertiports and match the induced unsteady disturbance field to the canonical disturbance forms, which then could be used in the development of the reduced order models (ROMs) for multi-rotor unsteady aerodynamic and acoustics responses. This study employs an open-source Navier-Stokes OpenFOAM solver to model the turbulent wind flow around a building. Based on the previous studies, a momentum source generating an upstream synthetic disturbance field (such as a time-harmonic gust or turbulence with required characteristics) is employed. Validation test studies are conducted to examine and compare with previous results for the benchmark case of 2D time-harmonic gust interaction with NACA0012 airfoil, and then the case of the turbulent wind interaction with a building. Furthermore, the non-uniform mean flow profile characteristic of the urban atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is implemented in the OpenFOAM simulations to examine and compare the effect of the non-uniform mean flow on the turbulent wind evolution and interaction with the rooftop vertiport.

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