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Autonomous UAV Aerodynamic Performance Analysis for the Near-Ship Environment

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Navy
Contract: N00014-07-M-0401
Agency Tracking Number: N074-004-0095
Amount: $69,948.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: STTR
Solicitation Topic Code: N07-T004
Solicitation Number: N/A
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2007
Award Year: 2007
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2007-07-23
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2008-05-23
Small Business Information
6210 Keller's Church Road
Pipersville, PA 18947
United States
DUNS: 929950012
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Jeremy Shipman
 Research Scientist
 (215) 766-1520
 shipman@craft-tech.com
Business Contact
 Neeraj Sinha
Title: Vice President & Technical Director
Phone: (215) 766-1520
Email: sinha@craft-tech.com
Research Institution
 UNIV. OF FLORIDA-REEF
 Lawrence Ukeiley
 
Dept. of Mech and Aero Eng 1350 N. Poquito Road
Shalimar, FL 32579
United States

 (850) 833-9350
 Nonprofit College or University
Abstract

The proposed research program aims to develop an efficient, high-fidelity simulation tool for ship-board flight testing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that provides a computational testbed for UAV design, autonomous control system design, and UAV/Ship integration analysis. The envisioned flight simulation approach will employ a library of existing high fidelity ship airwake datasets generated via CFD, coupled to a reduced-order aerodynamic model by an unsteady boundary condition. Offline models for the rotor disk loading, autonomous controllers, etc., can be linked to the aerodynamic model to predict the reaction of the UAV system to the unsteady ship airwake environment. Phase I will develop and demonstrate a simulation approach for a small UAV configuration recovering to a ship. Reduced-order aerodynamic modeling approaches including panel methods, one-way coupled Euler CFD, and one-way coupled Navier-Stokes CFD, will be evaluated. The relative fidelity and efficiency of the three approaches will be compared to a fully coupled CFD simulation of the same UAV/Ship combination. Experiments will be performed to demonstrate the capabilities to gather detailed data for validation of the numerical models. The proposing team consists of CRAFT Tech and Prof. Lawrence Ukeiley of the Research and Engineering Education Facility (REEF) at the University of Florida.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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