Similitude augmentation in sub-scale flight test model design: An MDAO based similarity maximization approach

By 2050, the aviation industry is expected to grow by 250-300% of its current air traffic. If left unchecked, the corresponding increase in atmospheric and noise pollution will have a catastrophic impact on the environment. Thus, improvements in aircraft design are urgently needed for a sustainable growth of the aviation industry. The...

Sub-scale flight test model design: Developments, challenges and opportunities

Growing interest in unconventional aircraft designs coupled with miniaturization of electronics and advancements in manufacturing techniques have revived the interest in the use of Sub-scale Flight Testing (SFT) to study the flight behaviour of full-scale aircraft in the early stages of design process by means of free-flying sub-scale models....

Incremental nonlinear control allocation for an aircraft with distributed electric propulsion: An application to the scaled flight demonstrator

To meet the demanding requirements on the environmental impact of aircraft, radically new aircraft concepts need to be developed. Within the NOVAIR project, Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) tests these new concepts on a Scaled flight demonstrator (SFD). Using an SFD allows for testing of dynamic and flight physical behavior of new...

Ready for Take-Off: Scaled Flight Testing

Atmospheric free flight scaled flight testing is an affordable way to investigate the dynamic properties of an aircraft, while enabling a wider range of test possibilities than a windtunnel. This research is the first step into the development of a scaled flight testing model and as such will highlighted the difficulties and discrepancies which...