The goal of this project is to develop a firefighting aircraft capable of meeting the demands of a market that lacks purpose-built aircraft and faces an ever-increasing threat. The W-132 is capable of making precise, targeted drops thanks to its high manoeuvrability, whilst maintaining a very high cruise speed and payload relative to its competitors. This report includes logistics, operations, sustainability, design process, feasibility, risk and cost analyses, providing a thorough overview of the team’s achievements.

The deployment and subsequent development of an Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) transportation system is expected to take an incredible amount of resources in terms of planning, time and capital. Due to the system not yet being operational anywhere, and consequently, the lack of clear operational boundaries set, researchers and developers are left with an enormous design space. Currently, parallel independent developments are taking place in all aspects of the system, and different perspectives have enabled a wide range of concepts to be formulated in each. Whereas independent assessments provide crucial insights into the individual components of the system themselves, they fail to capture the inherent interdependencies. They also do not capture the growth of the aircraft fleet in correlation with the growth of the vertiport network. This gives rise to the need for a framework which is capable of establishing a preliminary vertiport network to allow for the study of the aircraft, fleet and total system performance in a coherent manner, and the scalable correlated evolution thereof. Consequently, this study aims to develop a unified framework for the formation of a scalable vertiport allocation plan in conjunction with system-performance-based heterogeneous fleet sizing. The scalable vertiport allocator employs a distance-based agglomerative clustering algorithm to determine the clusters in the ultimate vertiport network and the k-means clustering algorithm to determine the preliminary location of the vertiport per cluster. This is followed by a commute-distance based vertiport elimination procedure to establish each vertiport network to be assessed. The optimal fleet at each stage of network growth is established through a parameter sweep conducted across the fleet size and composition. The system-based performance metrics of the combinations of vertiport network and fleet are then assessed using an on-demand agent-based simulation. The framework is applied to New York (NY) state and models of existing multi-rotor (MR) and tilt-rotor (TR) aircraft are utilized as test case. The test case results show the applicability of the framework in the establishment of a scalable preliminary vertiport allocation plan to maximize system commute distance, and the correlated growth of the optimal fleet based on the maximum system performance.

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging field which can revolutionize regional transport in the near future. KoriAir project aims to design a vehicle which is more efficient and quieter than current vehicles. This report presents the preliminary design solving those challenges. The resulting design is a two-vehicle configuration consisting of a lifting vehicle and a cruise vehicle. The lifting vehicle is a multicopter with vertical take-off and landing capabilities. The cruise vehicle design is based on a general aviation aircraft. After take-off, the coupled vehicles decouple, allowing the cruise vehicle to continue its mission before it couples in-air for landing. The report presents the preliminary design of two vehicles. In addition to that, a coupling mechanism with its control system is designed. To integrate well in the urban environment, noise generated by the vehicles is addressed. Infrastructural and operational aspects are also considered, with details about vertiport design and route planning presented.

Particle Tracking Velocimetry (PTV) is an effective and non-intrusive flow measurement technique that is able to provide quantitative information of the full velocity field at a certain instant in time, by tracking each particle individually with high-speed cameras. This permits to have a very high precision in measuring the flow evolutions. The abundant time information can then be leveraged by reconstruction algorithms not only to bring the information into a Cartesian format, but also to increase the space resolution of the original measurements. This thesis aims to explore the enhancement of the Navier-Stokes based reconstruction method called VIC-TSA (Vortex-in-Cell with Time-Segment-Assimilation) through the implementation of Radial Basis Functions (RBF). Moreover, it investigates whether the incorporation of RBFs can enable VIC TSA to match or exceed the accuracy of the VIC+ method. The improvements are evaluated numerically with a synthetic flow field (Taylor-Green sine wave vortex lattice) and experimentally (flow over a bluff body) with a real Lagrangian Particle Tracking (LPT) experiment in the TU Delft W-Tunnel.