Rotorcraft Research & Development
Key staff at waveI played a significant part in the design, build and test of Piasecki Aircraft's Speedhawk Vectored Thrust Ducted Propeller (VTDP) compound helicopter. The Speedhawk was initiated through a Phase I SBIR that advanced to the current Army Sponsored Advanced Technology Demomstration (ATD) program.
waveI staff contributed to this multi-year project by taking the lead in several advanced design and analysis components.
This included Drive Train Vibration, Ground Resonance and Wing/Flaperon/Duct Flutter analysis, Landing Gear design and simulation,
GenHel/Castle Simulation code development/integration, Full Airframe Loads Development, Flight Handling Qualities, Wing/Duct design refinements
for optimized flight performance and optimized design for Towing Missions. During test flights, significant flight load data reduction,
analysis and correlation studies were also conducted.
In addition to the Speedhawk program, significant design and development was contributed to Piasecki's Hybrid Airship Lighter Than Air (LTA)
projects and several Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) programs.
LG8 - A Java Tool
(A complete landing gear design, analysis and simulation tool developed to optimize and expedite the design process on the Speedhawk aircraft) The Java based tool supports selection of a suite of multi-stage oleos and tires and their repective load reaction profiles for various inflation pressures. Aircraft gross weight, inertias, C.G. and gear locations are input directly into the data fields or saved case files can be used. Complete dynamic response of landing conditions (descent rate/orientation) are viewable in realtime as load/deflection plots of each gear as well as a rendered 2-D profile aircraft simulation depicting tire and oleo deformations.
LTAPerform - An Excel Program
(A Lighter Than Air (LTA) Airship preliminary design and performance tool developed for competitive bid in the US Army Walrus project) The Excel program iterates on several design parameters (airspeed, volume, G.W., shape, lifting gas type, gas temperature, altitude, mission range, mission payload, fuel types, materials) to optimize on mission duration and cost, vehicle cost and other requirements. Performance analysis includes selection of a variety of lifting gases (helium, hydrogen, hot-air, water vapor, etc.), propulsive and furnace fuels (JP-8, diesel, hydrogen) and airship lifting body shapes from the historical "Cigar" ellipsoids to deltoids and delta wings. All performance aspects of a flight misson (take-off, climb out, cruise, loiter, descent, land, cargo unload and return flight) are included in the iterative optimization process.
FL3 - A Java Tool
(A wing flutter analysis and reporting tool developed to analyze/predict the onset of
aeroelastic instabilities on lifting and control surfaces) The FL3 tool has input tabs
that allow the engineer to supply bending and torsion mode shapes and natural frequencies,
and distributed station based wing/flap geometry, mass and inertia properties. For analysis,
user selectable bending/torsion modes, air density and iteration frequency ranges for coupled
aileron effects are included. All data may be saved/retrieved to data files. Colored U-g plots
are included in the results tab.